For the Love of Taco Bell

I celebrate each and every one of the "Real Men of Genius" Budweiser radio commercial ads, but the one about Taco Bell being the "conquistador of the calorie" takes the cake. It's so true that they have fooled the American public (no small feat, we all know) into believing that they could create "healthy" snacks. As the radio personality for "Real Men" ponders out loud, "Some may ask, 'is your taco salad healthy?' Of course it is; it's a salad."

As of late, Taco Bell has become even more clever by creating their very own drive-thru "diet" and "unique" meal items. Forget the Adkins diet with the gobs of meat intake necessary. Forget those diets where you only eat pea soup from Monday through Thursday and a banana only on Fridays. Eat Taco Bell! It clearly is the first and best choice for dieting.

Taco Bell boasts seven meal items that have less than nine grams of fat. Here are two major problems with this diet: 1) While ordering one of these seven items under nine grams of fat, you also encounter the other 100 menu items with 95 grams of fat or above. Please take a moment and visualize with me the "cheese sauce" that is a colloid, characterized as a) a form of matter having qualities of both a solid and a liquid and b) the consistency of Elmer's glue. In essence, this "cheese" is orange colored, salty ooze. Delicious, but not quite a diet item. 2) While in college, my good friend took a course called "The Meat We Eat." She learned in this class what grade of meat various familiar restaurants serve. Apparently, Taco Bell uses a meat Grade F. That's right, friends. Taco Bell's meat would have failed high school could definitely not have passed FCAT.

Each day, I drive past Taco Bell on the way home from work (thus, the fascination). I noticed that they are "Excited to Announce the Arrival of their Shrimp Tacos." I am excited to actually peruse these shrimp tacos. Even though we live on the coast, I would imagine these not to be creme de la creme shrimp babies. In fact, I wonder if there are hundreds of little plastic containers in the rear or the Taco Bell kitchens harvesting sea monkeys. I asked my friend Amy whether or not sea monkeys were a viable meat source for Adkins. I'm still waiting to hear back from her. I don't think they were in the manual.

For now, I run from the border.