Dirty Yellow Lies

   No one should be forced to confront their own hypocrisy. Not this way.  Not surrounded by a pile of yellow and orange balls of wax paper that once wrapped willful ignorance. And yet here I am, surrounded by grease stained taco wrappers that silently scream “Je tʼaccuse.” Each crumpled ball tells a dirty lie, and an even dirtier truth.

   Personally I blame Amanda Obney for this unpleasant journey of self-discovery. On January 19th, the Alabama law firm of Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis and Miles filed a lawsuit on Amandaʼs behalf in a California U.S. District Court against the Taco Bell Corporation.  According to the complaint, Taco Bellʼs beef tacos not only fail to meet the standards set for ground beef, but even the 40% fresh beef standard set by the USDA to qualify simply as "meat."

   While the allegations have been greeted publicly with tongue-in-cheek shock, the California lawsuit has deep personal implications. Implications that go much deeper than the possible health consequences of eating a substance that may be more grain and silicon dioxide (more commonly known as sand) than meat. Regardless of whether the taco filling is 100% beef or if it is just “meat adjacent” as Stephen Colbert suggested, this lawsuit exposes a personal ethical blind spot.

   Working in a small gourmet food shop, selling locally produced foodstuffs, I crafted a food narrative – not just about the products I sold, but about myself as a lover of raw milk bries and truffles. Herein lies the ethical dilemma. Embarrassing as it is to admit publicly, tacos, and more specifically Taco Bell tacos are deeply entwined in my culinary identity – at the age of 9 I taught myself how to make tacos, and as I progressed dreamed of working Taco Bell developing recipes. And this reality is at stark odds with the story of the locavore I have built for myself.

   According to food ethicist and director of the Centre for Ethics and Law in Copenhagen, Christian Coff, we connect to food ethically through the narrative of its production. Increasingly the story of our food is a carefully constructed work of fiction, packaged as fact. Fast food chainsʼ narrative focuses not on the food as a product but rather the brand as a life style, as a trusted childhood friend.

   Since Taco Bell opened its first Ontario location in 1981 I have had trouble passing a one without making “run for the border,” as an early Taco Bell advertising slogan urged. And while my soft taco may speak more of test tubes and high density feed lots, than cattle grazing in a rural idyll, I for one will still “think outside the bun.”