# Why is everyone's main complaint about Taco Bell the fact it's not "authentic Mexican food"?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-everyones-main-complaint-about-taco-bell-the-fact-its-not-authentic-mexican-food/855915
**Category:** Cafe Society
**Created:** [June 18, 2020, 6:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-everyones-main-complaint-about-taco-bell-the-fact-its-not-authentic-mexican-food/855915 "2020-06-18T18:33:43Z")
**Posts on this page:** 13
**Page:** 8
### Author:  [@purplehorseshoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/purplehorseshoe)
#### Post date: [July 1, 2020, 8:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-everyones-main-complaint-about-taco-bell-the-fact-its-not-authentic-mexican-food/855915/141 "2020-07-01T08:22:50Z")
That article about South Asians and Taco Hell was great. Thanks for posting it.
@Omniscient you mentioned “slimy fake guac” but I came into this thread originally to say, my only complaint with Taco Hell is the complete absence of any avocado-derived product.
Are you thinking of Taco Bueno? They have guac.
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### Author:  [@Tusculan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tusculan)
#### Post date: [July 1, 2020, 10:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-everyones-main-complaint-about-taco-bell-the-fact-its-not-authentic-mexican-food/855915/142 "2020-07-01T10:07:13Z")
> [@](#):
>
> @Omniscient you mentioned “slimy fake guac” but I came into this thread originally to say, my only complaint with Taco Hell is the complete absence of any avocado-derived product.
Are you sure? I’ve had guac, and see the [Canadian site](https://www.tacobell.ca/en/food/add-ons/premium-guacamole-side/). For some reason the US site menu is inaccessible and sends me to [yumyum.com](http://yumyum.com).
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### Author:  [@Seanette](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Seanette)
#### Post date: [July 1, 2020, 1:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-everyones-main-complaint-about-taco-bell-the-fact-its-not-authentic-mexican-food/855915/143 "2020-07-01T13:27:08Z")
Taco Bell does offer some green stuff labeled as guacamole, when I checked the menu on their website just now. Since I dislike avocado (thus don’t eat guacamole), I can’t say for sure how “real” it might be or anything about the texture.
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### Author:  [@WildaBeast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WildaBeast)
#### Post date: [July 1, 2020, 5:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-everyones-main-complaint-about-taco-bell-the-fact-its-not-authentic-mexican-food/855915/144 "2020-07-01T17:34:55Z")
> [@Balthisar](#):
>
> I took one of my Chinese employees to Greektown, Detroit, while he was on a business trip and I was on home leave. I took him a lot of places, but we ended up there to eat. This anecdote isn’t about whether or not the Greektown food is or isn’t authentic, but it’s about people from a culture where dog, bat, and anything that moves is fair game (literally fair game!) being a picky eater.
I heard a Chinese-American writer on NPR a few years ago (I can’t remember who he was, but IIRC he was one of the creators of the show Fresh Off the Boat). He read a passage from a book he’d written about growing up as an immigrant kid in America, in which he got invited over to a white friend’s house for lunch. They served this weird orange stuff that smelled like feet to him, and the other kids were like “You mean you’ve never had macaroni and cheese before?” Because of course mac and cheese is completely unlike anything they eat in China; in most regions they don’t even have cheese at all. In that context, I don’t think a Chinese kid being unwilling to try mac and cheese is any more of a “picky eater” than an American unwilling to try bat meat.
Granted, stuffed grape leaves would probably be at least a little less foreign to a Chinese person; they’re at least made for vegetables, meat, and rice. Unlike cheese, which I understand most non-Western cultures\* find gross.
\*no pun intended.
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### Author:  [@hogarth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hogarth)
#### Post date: [July 1, 2020, 5:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-everyones-main-complaint-about-taco-bell-the-fact-its-not-authentic-mexican-food/855915/145 "2020-07-01T17:48:29Z")
> [@WildaBeast](#):
>
> Granted, stuffed grape leaves would probably be at least a little less foreign to a Chinese person; they’re at least made for vegetables, meat, and rice.
Maybe he thought it was like a zongzi, where you eat the rice and other contents but not the leaf it’s cooked in.
> **[Zongzi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zongzi)**
>
> Zongzi (tsung-tsee; Chinese: 粽子), rouzong (Chinese: 肉粽; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: bah-càng), or simply zong (Cantonese Jyutping: zung2) is a traditional Chinese rice dish made of glutinous rice stuffed with different fillings and wrapped in bamboo leaves (generally of the species Indocalamus tessellatus), or sometimes with reed or other large flat leaves. They are cooked by steaming or boiling. People in the Eastern world often translate this dish into English as rice dumplings or sticky rice dumplings, alt As...
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### Author:  [@Balthisar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Balthisar)
#### Post date: [July 1, 2020, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-everyones-main-complaint-about-taco-bell-the-fact-its-not-authentic-mexican-food/855915/146 "2020-07-01T20:16:19Z")
Oh, god, I thought I was done looking at those this year. My wife made about 150 of them.
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### Author:  [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)
#### Post date: [July 1, 2020, 8:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-everyones-main-complaint-about-taco-bell-the-fact-its-not-authentic-mexican-food/855915/147 "2020-07-01T20:23:31Z")
> [@Seanette](#):
>
> Taco Bell does offer some green stuff labeled as guacamole, when I checked the menu on their website just now. Since I dislike avocado (thus don’t eat guacamole), I can’t say for sure how “real” it might be or anything about the texture.
The ingredient statement for Taco Bell’s guacamole, from [their U.S. web site](https://www.tacobell.com/nutrition/ingredients):
> [@](#):
>
> Avocado, water, tomato, onion, jalapeno, salt, cilantro, lemon or lime juice, ascorbic or erythorbic acid, xanthan gum, sodium alginate. [certified vegan]
May or may not be “authentic,” but at least it does have avacado, listed as the first ingredient (meaning that it’s likely the single most prevalent ingredient).
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### Author:  [@Omniscient](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Omniscient)
#### Post date: [July 1, 2020, 9:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-everyones-main-complaint-about-taco-bell-the-fact-its-not-authentic-mexican-food/855915/148 "2020-07-01T21:10:34Z")
> [@purplehorseshoe](#):
>
> @Omniscient you mentioned “slimy fake guac” but I came into this thread originally to say, my only complaint with Taco Hell is the complete absence of any avocado-derived product.
It’s in the 7-layer Burrito and the Power Menu items. It pops up in some of their limited-time specialty items too. You can have them add it to about anything.
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### Author:  [@Kron](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kron)
#### Post date: [July 1, 2020, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-everyones-main-complaint-about-taco-bell-the-fact-its-not-authentic-mexican-food/855915/149 "2020-07-01T22:03:30Z")
> [@Dewey\_Finn](#):
>
> > [@Omniscient](#):
> >
> > The tacos are fine, but most of their specialty items these days are basically some combination of mushy refried beans, sour cream, slimy fake guacamole, queso sauce and hot sauce with a few pieces of beef or chicken wading around inside some rolled bread product. It’s like eating a tube of TexMex toothpaste.
>
> I was in Taco Bell once watching them make the food while waiting for my order, and was amused that they use something like a caulking gun to dispense some of the ingredients. See [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrlHpOXpdSM&feature=youtu.be&t=148) for an example.
Every time I go through 🌮 🔔 drive thru and order a burrito or whatever, they always ask if I want sauce… and every time, my thought is immediately that they are already giving me a tortilla full of sauce, why would I want more? It is basically a taco smoothie.
Tasty, though.
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### Author:  [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2020, 4:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-everyones-main-complaint-about-taco-bell-the-fact-its-not-authentic-mexican-food/855915/150 "2020-07-06T16:32:49Z")
> [@madsircool](#):
>
> I still maintain that the foundation of American fast food is of German origin:
>
> hamburger-\> hamburger
What’s the story on things that are adapted from somewhere else? I mean, a hamburger is pretty much an American invention, with the original German dish being more like what we’d call a chopped steak.
Same for lots of American dishes, especially those with large historical immigrant enclaves- Texas had Germans and Czechs, who gave us stuff like chicken fried steak (variant of schnitzel), smoked brisket, kolaches (variants on the original Czech pastries and klobasniki), etc… And Tex-Mex is similar. Same for Cajun/Creole food and its original French roots. NY Jewish deli food is in large part US adaptations of original Ashkenazi food. And Italian-American food is the same- it’s sort of a set of pan-Italian adapted dishes.
I’d argue that most fast food in the US is distinctly _American_, as while their originating dishes might have foreign roots, they’re all fast-foodified versions of the American dishes. I mean, nobody is confusing a hot dog with a frankfurter as served at a stand in Germany. Similarly, nobody’s confusing a corned beef sandwich with anything that their great-grandparents were eating in the shtetl back in the day.
And nobody ought to confuse Taco Bell with actual Mexican food either.
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### Author:  [@Dr\_Paprika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr_Paprika)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2020, 9:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-everyones-main-complaint-about-taco-bell-the-fact-its-not-authentic-mexican-food/855915/151 "2020-07-06T21:53:34Z")
I’ve literally never heard anyone complain Taco Bell was not authentic, or who thought this food was the best Mexico had to offer.
Canada doesn’t offer 79 cent tacos. But it’s pretty impressive how many names you can give to the same four or five ingredients. You could probably do worse.
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### Author:  [@madsircool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/madsircool)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2020, 10:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-everyones-main-complaint-about-taco-bell-the-fact-its-not-authentic-mexican-food/855915/152 "2020-07-06T22:09:38Z")
Like Italian food. 👨🍳 🍅 🍆 🍷 😛
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### Author:  [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2020, 10:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-everyones-main-complaint-about-taco-bell-the-fact-its-not-authentic-mexican-food/855915/153 "2020-07-06T22:15:31Z")
> [@Dr\_Paprika](#):
>
> But it’s pretty impressive how many names you can give to the same four or five ingredients.
From _The Onion_, in 1998: “[Taco Bell’s Five Ingredients Combined in Totally New Way.](https://www.theonion.com/taco-bells-five-ingredients-combined-in-totally-new-way-1819564909)”
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