Should You Order Taco Bell Items with a Spanish Accent?

I'm not proud that I buy lunch once a week at a Taco Bell near my workplace. The Taco Bell sits right next to the bank where I use a Cash Station to do all my transactions. Deposits. Withdrawals. Transfers. Pretty much my whole life goes in and out that skinny slot where you put the envelopes, cash and checks.

When my banking is done and I'm pulling out of the driveway with $20, $40, or $100 in my pocket, it is difficult to pass up the Taco Bell. I rationalize this decision by telling myself that it is more ecologically efficient not to drive around and look for someplace healthier to eat. That rationalization sets off a whole stream of other objections to the Taco Bell menu, of course. There is all that beef that might be raised in who knows what cramped pen and fed with who knows what kind of genetically modified grain and hormones. There's no way for an average Joe to know what they're eating these days.

I admit that I don't really know what they feed all those cows fattened up in pens and turned into taco fodder. But every time I read a report about where meat like beef really comes from, I wind up realizing that meat is an everyday environmental disaster. I once read that 50% of the water used in America goes to raising cattle. Then we feed them all this horrific junk feed and stuff them full of hormones so they'll grow faster, bigger, fatter and meatier.

Who really knows if organic is any better? The bad stuff is already in the environment. Pesticides. Herbicides. Acid rain. Dust from nuclear fallout. Does that ever really go away? It's all out there, hanging around waiting to get into your food. Fact is, unless we raise beef cattle in a hermetically sealed tank, they're going to soak up crap that never leaves their systems. And you'll wind up eating it.

But I pull into Taco Bell anyway, because that's what Americans do. Fast food. We spend billions of dollars and half the water in America to make a food item you ingest in just under two minutes.

Of course I've also heard that the conditions in many fast food restaurants are horrible when it comes to sanitation. Even the ice isn't clean. But then again, how the hell can ice be dirty? Have germs developed some weird resistance to cold?

But let's admit it, the health department in most counties probably consists of a guy driving around in a bald-tired truck with a beat up clipboard. How many restaurants can that one guy cover?

So we're left to trust the big conglomerate corporations like Pepsico (that owns restaurants like Taco Bell) to have our health and best interests at heart. Yeah, right. Even the word "conglomerate" sounds dirty, like something you'd order at Denny's at 2:00 in the morning after an all night bender...I'll take the conglomerate, Over Easy.

We all know by now that corporations do not care if we get sick or die. But go ahead and try to sue them. I dare you. You'll lose. They have an entire army of lawyers just waiting to waterboard your lawsuit into submission. Even if you grow a third eye in the middle of your forehead from eating their food, you will not get sympathy from the judge. Those Pepsico lawyers will find some way to make the judge and jury believe you actually benefit from that third orb, so you can read the Taco Bell menu even better, I suppose.

I once read all about the Pepsico legal army in Harper's Magazine a few years. The article was published not long after I nearly died from food poisoning from eating at a Pizza Hut in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I never, ever want to be that sick again. But I did not sue because thinking back, I believe Food Poisoning was actually listed on the menu. I had no case.

Yet I still pull through the drive through every week at Taco Bell. Why? Because hunger makes you stupid.

Which brings me to the reason for writing this essay. How do you even pronounce the names for food on the Taco Bell menu?

Whenever I pull up to my local Taco Bell, a sense of reverse political correctness kicks in. I find myself pronouncing Taco Bell menu items with a Spanish language accent learned during my sophomore year in high school. I attended a tiny school smack in the middle of a cornfield where it was always so windy that 90% of everything you learned in class blew right out of your head the minute you stepped outside. And since I ran track, the wind effects were only increased, and I lost 110% of everything I supposedly learned at that school. I think I had to have a secret operation just to remember my name. But maybe that was just a visit to the dentist. I tend to confuse these things.

The one thing I did retain from those years at the high school in the cornfields was a really cheesy Spanish accent. I can really roll my 'r's with the best of them. So when I pull up to order a Gordita, I cannot just say "Gor-deet-ah" like a normal human being would say the word. Instead I kick into sophomore Spanish mode and pronounce it with a rolling "r" like this: "Gorrrdddthh-deet-uh!"

What a Dork! Did I already tell you I got a "D" in Spanish? I don't deserve to imitate the Spanish language, much less imitate it in public. But the Taco Bell menu makes me stupider than stupid just by looking at it. The cheese on all those menu items just pulls out my cheesy faux Spanish accent.

There are a whole lot of items on the Taco Bell menu that make my low-grade Spanish kick in. I can only imagine what the Latino workers who take my order must think. "What a freakin' idiot," most of them probably say. "Like Gordita is a real word: Gimme a break, Guero!"

Guero is a word that describes stupid Americans who have the cultural awareness of a Chalupa.

I learned that on a Beck CD. But i keep on ordering with a bad Spanish accent because I can't seem to help myself. I guess I am just thinking outside the bun.