The OP sounds a lot like someone ripped off an old Cheers joke. When Norm and Cliff went to The Hungry Heifer, Cliffy commented on how reasonable the prices were. Norm informed him that the pirces were low because the Heifer served bef, not beef, and said he should try the loobster next time. And no, that’s not mispelled.
As to Taco Bell’s meat-A friend of mine worked there as a manager. When he worked there (early 90’s), the meat came to the stores in bags, preground, needing only to be heated (and possibly have the spices mixed in). While I can’t comment on the types of meat used, I do know that he once found rubber pellets from a ground up boot in a bag of meat.
In the town my mother lives in (30 miles outside Milwaukee) there was a huge rumor going around that there was feces in the meat at Taco Bell. This rumor got around so much that they had to mail out flyers and took out newspaper adds denouncing it. Then a big rumor went around that a teenage employee masturbated into the sour cream. Again they made with the ads & flyers, only this time they threatened legal action against anyone who spread such rumors!
Poor Taco Smell. Maybe if they didn’t have such annoying comercials folks would start nasty stories about them.
Taco Bell can’t possibly use cats for their meat. Everybody knows that cats are saved for the chinese restaurants to use in their “Mar Far Alley Cat”. :D:D
All I can say after reading this is Thank God I’m a vegetarian. And how!
A lot of the satire here reminds me of a very racist “doggerel” poem by O. Henry I found in an old volume when I was a kid (it sure couldn’t be reprinted nowadays!).
It was about a Mexican whose grandfather had been killed in the Mexican War, so he decided to get revenge on the Yanquis. He came to New York and started selling tamales on the street. He obtained meat by catching stray dogs and alley cats. The poem concluded, “You have greased us all, greased us with your tamales.” I 'specks O. Henry wrote it in revenge for a stomach ache after eating a tamale from a street vendor. Here is the granddaddy of all your clever Taco Bell satire.
Remember the dog food scene in Eating Raoul? (Why are Mexicans always the butt of this sick brand of satire?) I just read an exceedingly macabre story by Ambrose Bierce, “Dog Oil,” that makes Eating Raoul look like kindergarten. I do not recommend reading large amounts of Bierce at one time. A little of that suff goes a long way.
Correctamundo. Meat has fat in it. This fatty oil is what makes the gelatanous goo. Processed meat products (Spam, sandwich chicken and turkey loafs, etc) grind and mix the meat into a lump so it can be shaped into a uniform shape and be more easily handled. These processed meats retain the fat. When cold, the fat is gelatanous, but heat it and it liquifies.
I’ve seen similar results with roast beef - the real kind bought from the store and cooked at home. Stick the leftovers and juice in a container to save in the fridge. Get out the next day and the top layer of the juice is a quarter inch thick slab of white. That’s the grease. Melt it and it returns the juicy flavor to the bowl. Same thing with chicken broth.
FYI I dated a butcher once. She operated the big knives, cutting up meat. She mentioned several instances of people losing fingers and such. (Fortunately they managed to reattach most of them.) She mentioned pitching out 5 lbs of ground beef after discovering she lost a band-aid one day.
the lowest grade of beef is Utililty grade, that’s probably what they use. There was a rumer around here a few years ago that somone found a rat tail in a taco.
BTW, I LOVE Arbys. they may pack thier meat in gelatin or gelatinous fat to keep it moist, but its reall beef and its GOOD. A hell of a lot better than ANY fast food burger or chicken.
OK, OK!!!
I used to work there.
The meat is beef. It comes in bags, pre-prepared. They heat them in what they call a “thermilizer”. Basically it’s boil-in-bag technology. I won’t swear to the quality of the beef, but it IS beef…no umlats anywhere. The bags are heated and the product is put into metal steam table pans. They have a special scoop to portion control it.
“Refried” beans are something else. They come as a dehydrated kind of dusty stuff that is rehydrated with super hot water and left to soak. As they sit in the steam table they dry out and more superhot water is mixed in. You can hear people say “I need bean water.” That’s what they mean.
Man, people…kangroo? Meat-like products? BEAR???
One of the hallmark service management cases you do in a traditional MBA program is the Harvard Business School case study for Taco Bell. In that report you learn that they used to have to make everything fresh early each morning and as a result, things were ineffecient, sometimes contaminated, and varied in quality from store to store. When they restructured the company, they went to the pre-cut/ pre-cooked in a bag technology so that each store would only have to invest in a hot water heating system as opposed to grills and huge refrigerator/freezer. This, of course, made the company hugely profitable, though they eventually got greedy, raised their prices, overextended their selection (ridiculous product proliferation) and slit their own throat. All indications I read in the case are that the meat only ‘tastes wierd’ compared to the meat made back in the early 1980s because it was re-heated vs. cooked fresh. Otherwise…I hate to disappoint you…it is normal ground beef. I don’t even have reason to belief it is poor quality meat, contrary to everyone else who thinks it is made out of recycled circus animals.
Out here on the west coast, I can’t say I’ve heard a whole lot of rumors regarding Taco Bell. I have at various points heard the kangaroo angle with Jack-in-the-box (although that is clearly idiotic). And heard all kinds of slander regarding contaminants in McDonald’s meat. Oh, and let’s not forget the KFC genetically modified all breast chickens with no legs, hooked to feeding tubes, etc. The only Taco Bell story I know of is that they had an outbreak of Hepatitis at one store in L.A. in the early 1990s which to my knowledge did actually happen. But that was caused by a worker at the store, rather than anything related to meat itself being bad. And I recall one of the major chains having e.coli problems at one point (didn’t an infant die?) though I can’t recall which one, they I recall it was a burger place…not Taco Bell.
And no, I do NOT work for Taco Bell. I just get pissed off at urban legends spread about fast food I occasionally like to eat.
Hey, Dragonlady, no bear. Bear_Nenno straightened us out about that rumor. No bear. Taco Bell does not serve bear. Unless several of them come in at one time and demand to be served.
So, Doctor Jackson (if you really are a “doctor”), what you’re saying is that Taco Bell uses the same grade meat as prisons. Lovely.
[sticks thumbs under suspender straps] I suppose spending all my money on crack doesn’t look so foolish anymore, huh? He-he-he. In your face, Mom! [/sticks thumbs under suspender straps]
And how!