Seems like two things going on to me:
A: It’s Mexican, ergo I’m more likely to get food poisoning.
B: It’s not authentic Mexican, why would anyone eat it?
Which is it? No one is anymore likely to get food poisoning from Taco Bell than any other place.
It wouldn’t be the Mexican part that makes you think you got food poisoning rather than maybe just eating too much, would it?
Are you calling his gastrointestinal tract a racist?
That’s a rather insulting question, especially considering that from the ages of 13-18 I worked in my step-mother’s Mexican restaurant and ate there as much as possible (because it was free), with no expectation of food poisoning.
And could you be suggesting that when my ex cooked Mexican food for me (she, like my step-mother, is a chilanga) I wanted to call in the county health board?
Insulting and presumptuous.
As for A: I was just mentioning one thing that happened to me. I still will occasionally go to Taco Bell, because it’s cheap and fast. Still, it’s the only place where I’ve ever in my life gotten food poisoning, and that takes into consideration places I’ve eaten at on the beaches on the Caribbean coast of Colombia where they don’t really have any running water, and street vendors in Tijuana that sell uncooked seafood cocktails.
B: I don’t really care how “authentic” it is. But I still realize the difference.
Really. Eating too much is called “indigestion,” and is a mild discomfort. Food poisoning is violent vomiting over a course of about 24 hours. It’s pretty easy to tell the difference, and since it was the only place I’d eaten for half a day, it was pretty obvious.
I apologize for offending you. What I meant was people are saying, “It’s Mexican; I got food poisoning. Just like when I went to Tijuana and got Montezuma’s Revenge.” Others are saying “Taco Bell is about as Mexican as McDonald’s”.
People generally don’t say “I got food poisoning at McDonald’s.” They just say, “I don’t like McDonald’s, it makes me barf.”
But they’ll say “I got food poisoning at Taco Bell.” Like it’s a sleazy Mexican street vendor with poor food handling practices. Hardly! I say.
As someone who lived across the alley and down four houses from a Taco Bell*…
you’ll get used to it. You might even get sick of it.
By the time we moved away from that house, I was only going there when they had free tacos. (If somebody hit a home run during a certain inning, and you had to know in advance, go there between 4 and 6 the next day, and ask. They didn’t advertise it, except on the game broadcast.)
*That’s right. I didn’t even have to cross a street.
Okay, I understand your point. In fact, you’ve brought up an interesting point about popular discourse; it just seems very far away from me. You have to remember that LA is a city where over 40% of the population speaks Spanish at home, and that’s largely in part because so many people of Mexican origin are here. So Mexican food is rampant, and few people think that Mexican food in public is any more susceptible to poisoning than Thai food, Armenian food, or Iranian food. I don’t know where you are, but it’s just not the case in Southern California. Los Angeles, in fact, is the largest city of Mexican population outside of Mexico City. There are more Mexicans in LA than in Guadalajara.
But I have to say that if Taco Bell has a higher incidence of food poisoning–and that’s a big “if”–it has little to do with the type of food offered. If, indeed, it has to do with the way the chain is operated, it’s about their standards.
For what it’s worth, I was born in San Diego and have lived most of my adult life in California. I learned to count to ten in Spanish before English. I don’t speak Spanish, but when people speak of being Latino I have a moment when I think “so?” It’s very normal for me.
FWIW, “eating too much” is called “overeating.”
Indigestion may result from that, but that’s not what it’s called.