An Unwelcome Dinner Guest

If there's a sure-fire way to ruin Mexican food, it's by adding a little America to it. The other night I went to dinner and ordered fish tacos. To my surprise, my horror, and my dismay, they were set down in front of me in shells that looked like this:


No seriously, once more. Dramatic pause...


I'm sorry, hold the phone. WTF did I order? You have got to be kidding me. I was so repulsed I think my boyfriend (time-out, that's a first for that word on this blog - okay time-in) was sort of embarrassed to be eating with me.

Hard taco shells. Is there another way to make your taco less appetizing and more difficult and frustrating to eat? They crack. They break. They drop your ingredients. They don't taste good. They don't heat well. They go stale after ten minutes out of their vacuum-sealed plastic bag. At least now they stand up on their own! Uh, only redeeming quality. Don't get me started on the lettuce in this picture, either.


Here's the thing. I grew up eating tacos like this. To a T. Somewhere around 1996 I think the ground beef turned to ground turkey, but I know all about these worthles shells that break the minute you bite into them, causing your beef and cheese to tumble to your plate - or lap. I know about the iceberg lettuce, the mild hot sauce (there's an oxymoron for you). My mom didn't know better, or maybe she didn't care, and my dad didn't object. Finally when my sister and I discovered flour tortillas, the hard corn shells were phased out - that one lone box of half-used shells remained for years in our pantry, turning from crispy hard corn to rubbery hard corn, never to be considered again. Seriously, once you discover the other varieties, why in the world would you even look at this bastardized, shelf-stable version of the original?

No, seriously that's an open-ended question.

There are starving people in third world countries but they don't go out of their way to make their grain-based foods into over-cooked shapes like this. They're not like, "Hey let's leave these out for awhile and let them harden so that when we try to eat them they crumble and we lose the food we worked 28 hours to make." Even - and I can't believe I'm about to say this - even Panda Express, which is a bastardized version of Chinese food, twenty times removed from its original form, tastes good in its own sugary, Americanized way (well, I don't think so but I can see why people would). But hard taco shells? STFU.


Hello, Lover.