It’s no skin off my nose personally, as I don’t eat meat and can’t recall the last time I ever had food at Taco Bell, but the popular, budget-friendly “Mexican” restaurant chain is being sued in Alabama for false advertising, as its “ground beef mixture” was tested and found to contain less that 35% meat in total (the other ingredients included oats, soybeans, ground-up Chinese newspaper, and chemicals, lots and lots of chemicals) which I guess even by fast-food standards is pretty shakey.
I suppose that Taco Bell enthusiasts already know they are not getting Kobe beef in their 49-cent tacos, but I wonder if this news will hurt Taco Bell’s business.
Will any of you stop patronizing Taco Bell over this?
I am a very occasional customer at Taco Bell. I don’t care (assuming you are joking about the newspaper.) I doubt that any of their regular clientele will care either.
I really don’t eat at Taco Bell, but I have to say I will wait till I hear from someone other than a lawfirm trying to take Taco Bell to the cleaners before I belive this one as fact.
I used to work for Taco Time <same thing, basically>. It was over 20 years ago, but at the time the meat was a 40/60 mixture of TVP and beef. (60% TVP, 40% beef) I’ve always assumed it was the same everywhere. If you’ve ever made ground beef tacos at home, surely you’ve noticed that the consistency of the meat is never the same as at the restaurants. And that is why.
The military and government have used TVP to stretch meat for…I don’t know, but it has to be many decades. With the exception of the newspaper <WTF?> this isn’t news at all.
The Chinese newspaper bit was a just silly Simpson’s reference—I can’t recall all the actual by-products that the lawsuit listed, but oats and soy protein were the first two mentioned…
I had two Taco Bell ‘beef burritos’ yesterday. They haven’t been on the menu for well over a decade at least, but you can still order them. Just “ground beef”, cheese, onions, and sauce. They taste the same to me now as they tasted twenty years ago, and they haven’t killed me yet.
I never get the tacos on the very rare occasions I got to Taco Bell. It’s been sort of a quasi-meat paste for years now (it USED to be real ground beef, and the tacos were at least edible IMHO). These days I get the grilled burrito with steak (never the default ‘ground meat’), and if it’s not real steak it at least tastes like and has the consistency of meat.
All of the fast food places I remember as a kid have changed how they make stuff and what they use for ingredients. Wendy’s used to have a decent hamburger, McDonald’s used to have decent fries, Domino’s and Pizza Hut/Pizza Inn used to actually be worth getting …even Burger King was edible when I was a kid. And, of course, Taco Bell used to actually have fast food that was edible, if not real Mexican food. Sadly, none of those places are worth feeding to my dog anymore (IMHO). These days about the only ‘fast food’ places I got to are Dion’s and Pei Wei.
That would actually make me more inclined to eat at TB. Of course, most people will be outraged to find out they’re actually eating something more healthy than they thought. And look for other chains to start touting “100% real beef” to take advantage of the oinkers.
Edibility aside, Burger King’s side dishes used to have taste. I don’t mean they taste bad now, they literally don’t have any taste. Their “onion rings”, french fries, and hash browns all have slightly less flavor than a mixture of cardboard and raw corn starch. I mean that literally. Their onion rings, especially, actually taste like cardboard.
I love Taco Bell, and couldn’t care less. I ate the 7-Layer burrito for years thinking it had meat in it. It doesn’t. Still tastes good and fills me up. As long as it looks and tastes the same, let them go all veggie.