Taco Hell
Thursday, February 11, 2010Last month I posted this bit about Taco Bell and its new marketing ploy to sell its garbage-disguised-as-food as “healthy.” The gist of the marketing campaign was Taco Bell’s new “incredible options,” with a slim woman – who obviously dines on Taco Bell! – as its spokesperson. Taco Hell’s “drive-thru diet” (that sounds so American) replaces fat with such wonderful things as “Mixed Triglycerides, Yeast, Modified Corn Starch, Corn Syrup Solids, Yeast Extract, Alginates (Sodium, Calcium And/Or Ammonium), Cellulose, Calcium Chloride, Partially Hydrogenated Soy Bean Oil, Malic Acid, Sodium Benzoate.” Yum. Thank goodness for healthy alternatives! One of the funniest dang things I have ever seen is Mark Sisson’s “Open Letter to Taco Bell.”
Consumers are fickle, skeptical doubters, and I’m sure you’ve heard some of the rumors and urban legends surrounding the origins of your meat. To jog your memory, there have been claims that your meat is of lower quality than dog food meat; that it contains feces; that there are fingernail fragments, human blood, ash, worm, copper wire residue, cellophane, and bits of Jimmy Hoffa floating around in your meat. While I’m fairly certain these accusations are false, I was unable to find any information on your website as to meat origin and quality. I even called your hotline, with no further success. Why not replace one of the 3 giant 5 layer burrito posters on each store using the third to show a picture of the grass fed, grass finished cows that I’m sure you use to make those burritos.
Michael says:
February 12th, 2010 at 3:23 pm
Eh, who cares? Let people make their own decisions on what they want to put into their body. Anybody that has a body temperature in the nineties should be able to make a rough estimation of the nutritional content found in Taco Bell products.
cousin lucky says:
February 12th, 2010 at 7:30 pm
It is easy to disregard the fact that you are poisoning yourself and your loved ones by consuming ” fast food products ” because it is so easy; and our society is quite lazy and quite ignorant!! You Betcha!!!
damaged justice says:
February 14th, 2010 at 6:55 am
Michael: When did anyone here say a word about not allowing people to make their own decisions?
Or did you just decide to drop your load of wisdom on us and skedaddle?
liberranter says:
February 14th, 2010 at 5:18 pm
Even more evidence that my opinion that Taco Bell has the most loathsome and disgusting “fast food” of any major chain is well founded.
Austin says:
February 17th, 2010 at 9:40 pm
Yum Foods sure knows how to woo the fat, brain-dead Americans. Boobus doesn’t want eat healthy. Boobus doesn’t even want to move. So tell Boobus that by not eating healthy and driving around to the pick-up window, he’s going to fit in skinny jeans. For the rest of us, it’s no less than a complete insult to our intelligence. And those alginates that may or may not contain ammonium sound so food-like and healthy!
Jeannie Queenie says:
February 20th, 2010 at 2:01 pm
A brilliant fella named Meatyochre put this raw video online. His words, not mine, in reference to the video are thus…”In order to be effective, such production of socially necessary waste requires continuous rationalization – the relentless utilization of advanced techniques and science. Consequently, a rising standard of living is the almost unavoidable by-product of the politically manipulated industrial society, once a certain level of backwardness has been overcome. The growing productivity of labor creates an increasing surplus-product which, whether privately or centrally appropriated and distributed, allows an increased consumption – notwithstanding the increased diversion of productivity. As long as this constellation prevails, it reduces the use-value of freedom; there is no reason to insist on self-determination if the administered life is the comfortable and even “good” life. This is the rational and material ground for the unification of opposites, for one dimensional political behavior. On this ground, the transcending political forces within society are arrested, and qualitative change appears possible only as a change from without”. -Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man – So after you view this video you will see why Meatyochre has brilliantly summed up the links between a political and corporate ideas which keep the masses, virtual asses who assume that they have reached the good life.the matrix of labor, production, consumption and increasing surplus is all manifested in the fast food industry, notwithstanding the horrific dietary aspects..the guy is wicked smart to point this out so brilliantly in this video. So the problem isn’t just one of lousy fattening food, it goes much much deeper in what it does to the cultural psyche. To my way of thinking that is even worse than empty calories or lack of nutrition. For if you are thinking is off kilter then the state can really control you to the nth degree. Video here is entitled das racist combination pizza hut and taco bell.Here it is
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6xXl3KuS8&feature=related
Jeannie Queenie says:
February 22nd, 2010 at 11:55 pm
Mark Morford , a San Francisco Gate columnist more often than not, is on the ticket with his witty perceptions. This recent writing about a woman in a fast food joint who gave birth in the mall is both sad and hilarious in its own way.—”Speaking of
McDonald’s. Did you hear? A woman was sitting in the McDonald’s over in the Great Mall in Milpitas just recently, consuming her capitalism-approved portion of hormone-blasted industrial feedlot beef and HFCS-injected everything (though, to be fair, it could have been one of their “healthy” prepackaged nuclear salads), when, of course, she went into labor. In another paragraph..”Reading that story,it was
impossible for me not to note how this woman, this divine fertile feminine life force, was likely consuming some of the worst possible processed foodstuffs imaginable right up to the moment she birthed a human baby — a child, we can politely surmise, that had been nourished through much of its gestation by a veritable pharmacy of bloodstream toxins, fats and salts and corn syrups, synthetic flavorings and hormones from that selfsame feedlot beef.”
And so we can see that this hideous american diet begins in the womb, but leads to the tomb all to often with health problems in later life. You can read it here at
: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/02/17/notes021710.DTL&nl=fix#ixzz0gKbV9OEk