This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode Talking Taco, first released on September 9, 2025. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

CYNTHIA GRABER: Okay. Para, so para ella, big bebe y big tlacuache. Y para mi, big tlacuache y girando, sin cilantro.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Oh don’t mind us, we’re just hanging out in Mexico City ordering tacos from a little stand, as you do.

GRABER: This is my favorite taco stand in Mexico City. It’s a vegan one called Por Siempre Vegana, and it was the first place Nicky and I went out to eat after we landed in Mexico.

TWILLEY: All right, you going first? Get in there.

GRABER: Okay, so this one has beans. This one doesn’t. This one has pineapple and all sorts of fun things. …Oh, it’s spicy! Mm! So good. Okay.

TWILLEY: Alright, I’m going to start. You started with the pastor so I’m going to start with the big baby, which I can’t even remember what it is, but it looks freaking amazing, so. …Mmh! …That’s hitting the spot.

GRABER: Tacos do frequently hit the spot, these days not just in Mexico City, but all around the world. That’s the topic of this episode of Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history, I’m Cynthia Graber.

TWILLEY: And I’m Nicola Twilley. And you might be thinking, tacos, really? What’s to say about tacos? But what if I asked you if a burrito is also a taco? Or a fajita? Or what about a chimichanga?

GRABER: This is a good question. And here’s another one: we just did an episode all about corn and Vitamin T, the omnipresent tortilla, which has certainly been around for thousands of years. So why did the taco only show up in the late 1800s?

TWILLEY: And how did Taco Tuesday, complete with hardshell tacos, hamburger meat and iceberg lettuce, ever become a thing?

GRABER: Listen on to find out! But before we dive in, in case you missed the news in the last episode, we’re going to be sending out the invite to our exclusive, once-yearly, fan-favorite Gastrohang soon, that’s going to be taking place on October 8, and you can get on the invite list at gastropod.com/support.

TWILLEY: Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, in partnership with Eater.

GRABER: Speaking of Eater, Our friends at Eater turn 20 this year! And the brand is celebrating two decades at the center of the food world by throwing its biggest event ever on September 20th in New York. It’s called Eater Off Menu—it’s presented by Capital One—and it will be an immersive, food-focused bash, propelling guests through the last two decades of American food culture, spotlighting the restaurants, chefs, and trends that defined the era.

TWILLEY: Culinary talent includes legends like Sean Brock, Jason Wang, and Cristina Martinez, and can’t-miss restaurants like Tatiana, Pizzeria Mozza, Momofuku, Carbone, Bar Contra, Hani’s, Via Carota, and more. For tickets, go to eater.com/offmenu.

[MUSIC]

TWILLEY: It seems kind of ridiculous to ask, what is a taco, but we’re going back to basics.

ALONSO RUVALCABA: Something that is wrapped, that is a food wrapped in some other food. It’s a wrap. That’s it! It’s, it’s a universal.

GRABER: Alonso Ruvalcaba is a writer in Mexico City, and he wrote a book with chef Enrique Olvera called Sunny Days, Taco Nights.

RUVALCABA: And if aliens were to come, I’d just point at their folded over food and say: that’s a taco.

TWILLEY: Uhhh, so wait: is a calzone also a taco? Or an empanada? Or a Cornish pasty? Or can we narrow this down a little?

GRABER: Jeffrey Pilcher is a professor of food studies at the University of Toronto and author of the book Planet Taco, and he gives a slightly more constrained definition of the taco.

PILCHER: A taco to my mind is a tortilla with something inside of it and salsa. Okay. So that would be my three qualifications: tortilla, filling, salsa. Although that seems redundant ’cause the salsa’s kind of a filling. But I think that, that there has to be a salsa. And if it’s not really chili in the salsa then it’s not really salsa. So. Here I am qualifying it.

TWILLEY: So to have a taco at least Jeffrey thinks you really need a tortilla. And if you need a tortilla, then that means that if you wanted a taco 3,000 years ago or 4,000 years ago, you were SOL. Because the earliest archeological evidence for a comal—the griddle you cook a tortilla on—that only dates back 2,000 years.

PILCHER: If the tortilla then becomes kind of the, the baseline definition of, of a taco, something you can’t have a taco without, then it certainly is no more than about 2000 years old.

GRABER: Since the invention of the tortilla, there must have been taco-like foods, where someone just wrapped the tortilla around a filling.

RUVALCABA: The shape existed. The necessity to wrap foods in some kind of masa existed. They just had to find each other. And they did.

TWILLEY: But the question is: when and how? For a long time, people have woven stories about the origins of the taco. There’s one taco origin story that Jeffrey told us that’s from the 1960s, it was written by a poet and playwright called Salvadar Novo.

PILCHER: He wrote what is sort of the first real history of food in Mexico. And he cites the origins, the first taco as being a corn tortilla with chorizo—sausage from a pig—that was served to Cortez 500 years ago. And so it becomes a way of sort of… imagining or assigning to a food this kind of creation myth for the Mexican nation.

GRABER: This myth is based on the idea that a real taco isn’t just a tortilla with something random in it; it’s a tortilla with meat, and specifically with pork or beef. And pigs and cows only got to what’s now Mexico after the Spanish arrived. So there was this myth that the taco was a combination of indigenous and Spanish foods.

PILCHER: And I mean, there’s no evidence for it, at all. It’s just that, you know, that fits conveniently with his sort of nationalist image.

TWILLEY: In fact, although there were many street foods and snacks in Mexico in the 1600s and 1700s, and many of them involved corn dough or a tortilla wrapped around something in some way, none of them were called tacos.

PILCHER: The closest thing to what we would think of as a taco now would be the envuelto, which is just Spanish for “the wrap.” And it’s, it looks like a taco from the recipes we have for it. But some something of a cross between a taco and an enchilada. So that it’s, it’s, it’s a tortilla wrapped around something, but then covered in salsa.

GRABER: But then by the 1890s, 1900s, there were people selling tacos all over Mexico City. So where did this food called a taco come from?

PILCHER: So. There are people who have tried to find indigenous language etymologies for the taco. And so ‘tlaco,’ is one of them, means half in Nahuatl. And, and so if you fold it in half, that’s possibility. There’s ‘itacate,’ which is kind of like a takeout food, and, and you know, you can take out a taco, and or so that’s another possibility.

TWILLEY: But these etymologies are all just so much baloney, according to Jeffrey. Because the word taco existed long before it was the name for a food.

PILCHER: The actual word taco has a very clear meaning in Spanish. And in fact in all European languages. The original meaning is a tack in English, or a peg. Or something, you stick in something. And the first dictionary definition of taco is from about 1600. It’s in French. And it refers to the or cloth wadding, I guess you would say. That was used to put, gunpowder into an early firearm. So what you do is you’d, you know, kind of pour gunpowder down the barrel and then you’d put this cloth to pack it in. To tack it in.

GRABER: Taco also came to mean the cue you use to play pool. And apparently people in Spain in the 1840s used the word taco to refer to a little snack that they’d have with a drink. It was used for things that were cylindrical or things that filled a gap.

TWILLEY: But in Mexico, Jeffrey says that the first appearance of the word taco was in the mid-1800s, in a silver mine called Real Del Monte which is about sixty miles northeast of Mexico City.

PILCHER: The miners would extract the rock face to pull out the silver ore by taking a piece of paper and putting gunpowder down it, rolling it up. And and then sort of pegging it into the, the, the, the rock face. They’d hollow out little holes with their picks. Put it in there, light it. So it’s, it is essentially a little, a homemade stick of dynamite. And it would blast that out.

GRABER: It was a cylindrical object that was stuffed into a gap: it’s a taco, and that’s what it was called. But of course the miners also needed to eat. So they wrapped their tortillas around something and would take those into the mine with them.

PILCHER: So they would take a tortilla and put potatoes. And potatoes were just a convenient thing that you can grow in that mountainous area where the mines were. And then maybe some salsa, and then they would wrap it up, and put it in a basket. And that was the lunch that they would carry with them.

GRABER: And those lunch potato-filled tortilla wraps started to be called tacos by the miners, because they looked like their gunpowder tacos. And there you have it: the very first Mexican food tacos were born.

TWILLEY: Just to add a little wrinkle to this neat and tidy story, I should also say that at the time, many of the miners were actually Cornish. Cornwall is famous for its mines, and they’d been recruited to help improve local mining techniques. And apart from mining expertise, they brought two other things with them. Football, or as you’d call it Cynthia, soccer. Apparently, the very first soccer game in all of Mexico was played near the mine by a Cornish team, and now look how popular the game is in Mexico.

GRABER: Fascinating, but Nicky, where are you going with this story?

TWILLEY: Bear with me here, because what’s intriguing is they also brought their own folded-over mining snack: the pasty. A Cornish pasty is essentially a pastry empanada, with a meat and veg filling. Now: I’m not saying that the pasty inspired the taco. But I’m not *not* saying it.

GRABER: Sure. And also as Alonso and Jeffrey both said, people have been wrapping tortillas around things for thousands of years, and everyone everywhere folds something over something else—so I’m also guessing they just kind of shared their lunches.

TWILLEY: In any case, the miners of Real del Monte are the ones who started called tortillas folded over a filling a taco. And Alonso said it’s easy to tell that it’s a brand new coinage, because when edible tacos started to appear outside the mine, they needed to be qualified or explained a little.

RUVALCABA: You had tacos de tortilla, which means, tortilla tacos. Which by now—we think are an obvious thing, but they weren’t. And people said, for example, tacos de tortilla, con aguacate. Avocado taco on a tortilla.

GRABER: At first, though, most of these tacos were just being eaten by miners.

TWILLEY: But this was a turbulent period in Mexican history, and the mines opened and closed and opened again, and when the miners were out of work, they migrated in search of jobs.

PILCHER: And of course, the nearest place that they could go was Mexico City.

GRABER: They brought their tacos with them, and by the late 1800s, the miners’ wives started selling those tacos on the streets.

RUVALCABA: And those first tacos were what we call now tacos de guisado, which are leftover tacos. Somebody makes a guisado, which is stew or something. Feeds the family. And the day after they sell, they sell whatever was left. And sometimes they used to put them in a basket. So those were sweated tacos, or tacos de canasta.

GRABER: Canasta means basket in Spanish. And the sweated thing …

PILCHER: Because they’re kind of, you know, sitting there in their own steam. But originally, they were referred to as tacos de minero. Miner’s tacos.

GRABER: More evidence that this new food, the taco, really does have its origins down the mines.

TWILLEY: For those of you who haven’t tasted a sweated taco, the name does make it sound deeply unpleasant, but it’s actually utterly delicious.

RUVALCABA: They’re beans, chicharron, and potato. They’re folded. And… I don’t know. The, the flavors just combine, combine with one another. They are incredibly tasty. And they come with salsa verde or pickled chilis, pickled jalapenos, I think. I do remember when I was about 15 or something like that, that I got to know tacos de canasta. And I went crazy for those tacos. And started eating them daily.

GRABER: Around a century before Alsonso’s revelation, many people were having the same experience. New tacos stands were opening up all the time at the turn of the century, because the idea of selling tacos as a street food, that was picked up by other women, not just ones who came to town with their miner husbands.

RUVALCABA: What was happening in the early 20th century, late 19th century was a big influx of people from, from all over the country. Trying to live in Mexico City. And trying to adapt their foods to Mexico City food. And what they, what they did was take the vessel of the tortilla and just put whatever, whatever food came with them, on those tortillas. And just serve as tacos.

TWILLEY: After all, the tortilla could hold all kinds of fillings. And tacos made the perfect street food.

PILCHER: I mean, because it’s sort of the, the tortilla contains not just the food, but also the way of, of eating it. Right. It becomes a plate and, and silverware. It’s just, you know, you put the food in the taco, wrap it up in the tortilla and, and eat it and, and you can walk away and, and that’s terrific.

TWILLEY: Jeffrey told us that by the early 1900s, these first taquerias were showing up in municipal records, but also in photos.

PILCHER: We can look at pictures that were taken around 1900. Of women on street corners. Some men too but, but mostly women. With bowls sort set over, little braziers, so the bowls have some kind of guisado, some stew, something that’s cooking away.

GRABER: So many people started making tacos that they both diversified, and also people kind of specialized. First, there was a split between what you might get for breakfast, more of a stew taco, and what you might buy at night—the meat would be cooked over a grill.

RUVALCABA: Taco sold by women, stayed in the morning. And then tacos sold by men kind of drifted into the night. Because… Well, you know, the ambience [LAUGH] of nighttime tacos is not the same. What we call a la parilla, when you have bistec, steak tacos, or rib tacos, and al pastor. Those kind of kinda drifted into the nighttime tacos. And guisados and canasta kind of stayed in the morning, for the ladies to prepare them.

TWILLEY: But even beyond grilling vs stewing, the fillings started to really diversify in terms of ingredients and flavors.

PILCHER: Because these women are coming from all parts of Mexico and they’re bringing their regional foods with them. And the taco becomes that convenient way of selling it, either to people from their home state, who are familiar with the food, or to strangers who are just kind of curious about, you know, what are the foods of the particular region where they come from.

RUVALCABA: You had the carnitas tacos from Michoacan, which is another state in Mexico. And tacos de marisco, which can be shrimp tacos or fish tacos. From the north in Mexico from Baja California. Or tacos from the Yucatan. Which of course existed there, but in Mexico City, they found this taco friendly environment.

GRABER: The yucatan tacos are called cochinita, they’re pork that’s been marinated in annatto seeds and sour oranges so it’s both acidic and red, and it comes with pickled onions and habaneros.

TWILLEY: Basically a million tacos bloomed on the streets of Mexico City. Among the most famous were the al pastor tacos, one of the nighttime tacos Alonso mentioned.

PILCHER: And these tacos, which, you know, are, they’re cooked on that vertical rotisserie, just like like shawarma are in fact shawarma, that they were introduced by Lebanese migrants to Mexico in the 1920s. Originally they were called tacos arabes. Arab tacos. And they used lamb, and they put ’em on flour tortillas.

RUVALCABA: But it changed through time. First of all, got rid of the lamb and substituted with pork. And then the adobo kind of drifted, towards something more spicy. Started using chilies, which were not in the original recipe.

TWILLEY: The other thing that makes al pastor one of the all time great tacos is that it has pineapple in it. No one knows how the pineapple got in there, but as everyone knows, pineapple and pork taste great together which is why I will defend the supremacy of the Hawaiian pizza to my dying breath.

GRABER: I take no sides in this argument, I don’t think I’ve ever eaten a Hawaiian pizza. But back to tacos, by the 1960s, the al pastor taco as we know it today had taken over Mexico City.

PILCHER: And, and now of course, they’re on every street corner. They are the most, you know, quintessential authentic Mexican food.

GRABER: So in only a few decades, tacos went from being unknown to basically becoming totally ubiquitous in Mexico City, and from a potato-filled miner’s snack to the perfect vessel for almost every flavor Mexico had to offer. But not everyone was so into them. Why some Mexicans kind of hated tacos, after the break.

[BREAK]

TWILLEY: Tacos seemed to have everything going for them: delicious, portable, versatile, and popular. But they were definitely street food. And street wasn’t always the trendy hipster thing it is today.

RUVALCABA: When I was growing up, you know, it was… this poor kid. Only thing he eats is tacos. They were looked down upon. It was a poor person’s food.

GRABER: This negative view of tacos as poor people food was there right from the beginning, but there was another problem: tacos were made with corn tortillas, and rich people did not like corn.

PILCHER: Oh, there was a very negative view of corn. And, and it was just associated with the indigenous people, who were viewed in a negative, very, very negative fashion. And that if you were anybody in Mexico, you ate wheat bread, which was the foods of the Europeans.

TWILLEY: Of course, tacos were still delicious, as aforementioned, so the wheat eating elite might have some late at night, sort of slumming it. Or enjoy them in a quote sanitised version they could make at home.

RUVALCABA: You can read that in home magazines from the 1910s. You want to have some tacos, but not the tacos from domestic workers. But you want them a little gentrified. And you read that. It’s kind of uncomfortable.

GRABER: Jeffrey said that if you were wealthy, you ate wheat and looked down on corn eaters. But the truth is that most of Mexico at that time was still eating corn, because first of all, most of them were poor, but also because corn grew really well just about everywhere in Mexico, as we told you in our corn episode. And wheat really didn’t do so well in most of the country.

TWILLEY: And most of the country was eating tacos by the early 1900s. People who had migrated to Mexico City for work came home and recreated them in their own communities.

PILCHER: Oh, it spreads out very quickly. And, we start to see regional specializations of tacos

GRABER: Like in parts of the country where goat was more common, you’d get goat tacos. Then in a part of the country where wheat grew particularly well, that became part of taco culture.

TWILLEY: This is the northernmost part of Mexico, in Sonora, just south of Arizona, where relatively few people lived when the conquistadors first arrived.

PILCHER: Because it was so dry. And it just couldn’t support the same populations as the more abundant agriculture of central and southern Mexico. And precisely because it was dry, it made it an ideal place for growing wheat. Because too much rain causes rust, which damages the crop. Spaniards begin to migrate north with the discovery of silver mines. And so that’s kind of, those boom towns then are what draws Spaniards north.

GRABER: And so because the Sonora region was so Spanish and not particularly indigenous, and because wheat grew so well there, that’s where the wheat tortilla was launched. They still ate tacos, they just used wheat instead of corn.

TWILLEY: And the taco spread even further north, into the borderlands that used to be part of Mexico: California, Texas, New Mexico.

PILCHER: I mean, there are tacos being served in, in Texas, in California already by 1906.

GRABER: These taco places were run by Mexicans and made for Mexicans. Mexican food wasn’t popular with most non-Hispanic Americans at the time.

TWILLEY: The perception was that it was spicy and weird and not in a good way. Plus they had no idea how to navigate a taco, like how to actually eat it.

PILCHER: Yeah, it was a, a sort of a challenge. And just like the eating with chopsticks for the Chinese restaurant, this was something that early tourists commented on.

GRABER: It took a white guy to introduce the taco to most of white America—that guy was named Glen Bell, of Taco Bell fame.

SINGERS: Watch us make your food afresh! At Taco Bell, Taco Bell. Make your feelin’ taste buds tingle—Taco Bell, Taco Bell!

[MUSIC]

PILCHER: Glen Bell grows up in Southern California in the town of San Bernardino. Which is sort of east of Los Angeles. And he joins the Marines, goes to World War II, comes back, is kicking around, looking for something to do. And opens up a hot dog stand. This was about 1947, 48.

TWILLEY: Glen had tried hauling bricks and running a miniature golf course. But hamburgers and hot dogs were having a bit of a moment in San Bernandino immediately post World War II.

PILCHER: At about that time, the McDonald’s brothers, Maurice and Richard McDonald, are transforming their car hop restaurant into the original industrial fast food restaurant. The McDonald’s system involved stripping down the menu to just a handful of products: a hamburger, fries, and a shake. And selling it in vast quantities, at low prices.

GRABER: At this time, after World War II, America was changing. The suburbs were being built, we had cars and highways and people wanted to drive those cars to restaurants—we told you about this in our episode called the United States of McDonald’s.

TWILLEY: Meanwhile, the American food system was being industrialized. Meat production was scaled up, ingredients were cheap. It was just the perfect moment for American-style fast food restaurants, like McDonald’s, to take off.

PILCHER: They’re able to produce this very small menu in vast quantities, and they’re selling ’em for like 10 cents each. And the people line up around the block to get to get this food. And Glen Bell, like so many other people, is just astonished at this new industrial system for feeding people.

GRABER: But Glen wasn’t just checking out McDonald’s—he was also eating at the local Mexican restaurants in San Bernadino, where there were plenty of Mexicans. He thought he might be able to kind of anglicize the taco, and make the taqueria a place that white people would want to go to.

TWILLEY: While also copying the McDonald’s magic.

PILCHER: And so he wants to find some way of taking that system, and applying it to a different market niche. And it’s the Mexican restaurant, then, that forms the model that he, he follows.

TWILLEY: His wife said it wouldn’t work: white people wouldn’t never be able to handle the spice. And Glen said he’d make it less spicy, and she told him then no one would want to eat it. But they divorced, and he went ahead with his plan.

PILCHER: And what he does is he, to sort of industrialize the production of the taco, he pre-fries the tortillas. And invents this little mold that he can then dip into the hot oil to fry it. And in his authorized biography, he claims that he invents this system, and that he’s this genius and that he is bringing sort of North American, you know, can-do technology to this age-old Mexican dish.

GRABER: Glen Bell’s story was that in the Mexican restaurants he went to, the tortillas were soft, and the cooks would stuff them and then fry them, and it took a really long time to do it that way. He says his great innovation was the invention of that pre-frying and the mold.

TWILLEY: Maybe, but he certainly wasn’t the first to come up with a fast fried taco shell.

PILCHER: The first patent for it is filed by a Mexican restaurateur, Juvencio Maldonado, in New York City. At the time when Glen Bell is still making hot dogs. The recipe is also in various Mexican cookbooks in the Southwest. And so this idea of making a taco shell and then filling it was absolutely not invented by Glen Bell. But he wants to kind of create this image, that he is this technological innovator. And that, yeah, Mexican food has its own charms, but that if you wanted it in a hurry, you had to go to Taco Bell.

GRABER: It wasn’t just Mexican food for people in a hurry, it was also Mexican food for people who were kind of afraid of Mexican food. As he told his ex-wife he would do, he took out the spice, and any of the other flavors that would make a taco particularly Mexican tasting. Like Mexican tacos, they were filled with meat, but this wasn’t roasted or stewed pork, it was hamburger.

PILCHER: Maybe some lettuce and tomato, some cheese. And these are all products of the, you know, industrial food system, of California’s abundant agriculture. And so you’re getting very different foods, right? Ground beef instead of the assorted pork parts that you eat in Mexico City. Instead of some onion, chopped onion and cilantro, which is the typical topping from a Mexican taco, you’ll get chopped lettuce, iceberg lettuce from the fields of Salinas, California, tomato and, and then that kind of cheddar cheese.

TWILLEY: It was philosophically the same, in that the ingredients were cheap, but culinarily quite distinct. And the restaurants themselves were deliberately branded in a way that was more Spanish than Mexican. They were built to look like Spanish missions, with stucco walls, red tile roofs, and arches.

GRABER: But tacos were still a little exotic—Taco Bell had to have hamburgers on the menu, too, up until the 80s. And for the first couple of decades, it was really just a regional restaurant. Glen Bell wasn’t able to realize his dream of being like McDonald’s until the ‘70s, when the chain started to expand nationally.

PILCHER: So it’s, it’s not instantaneous by any means.

TWILLEY: When Glen Bell sold the company to Pepsi in the late 70s is when it really started to take off, and now there are Taco Bells in every state and US territory.

PILCHER: I mean, I, I think one factor for why it’s successful is it was selling it outside of the Mexican community. That you know, in the, in across the lines of segregation in southern California. A lot of people wanted to try tacos, but they didn’t necessarily want to go into Mexican neighborhoods to do it.

SINGER: You gotta cross it jump it bust it bump it; you gotta cross it jump it bust it bump it! Taco Bell has your order –

MAN: I’m starved.

SINGER: Make a run for the border!

TWILLEY: But there was another way for people to try tacos without even leaving the house. And why not both, as they say?

BOY AND GIRL ARGUING: Suave! Duro! Suave! Duro!

VOICOVER: How do you choose between crunchy and soft tacos?

LITTLE GIRL: Por que no los dos?

[EVERYBODY CHEERS, MUSIC]

GRABER: The story of Old El Paso, coming up after the break.

[BREAK]

GRABER: Before I ever even heard of Taco Bell, there was one thing I knew: we would regularly have crunchy U-shaped corn tortillas that came in a yellow box, and my mom would put out bowls of hamburger meat flavored with their spice package, as well as lettuce, tomatoes—it was taco night. When I was little I don’t think I even realized it was Mexican, at least in origin. It was just Old El Paso.

PILCHER: Old El Paso starts out as a canning company. And they begin to sell things like chili and chili peppers—sort of the foods of the area around El Paso. And with the rising interest in tacos, they start to sell these tortilla shells, the taco shells as well, in these packages.

TWILLEY: In the early 1900s, El Paso—the town, not the brand—became a bit of a hot spot for canned Mexican foods. The big company was actually called Ashley’s Mexican Foods, which had won a huge contract to sell canned enchiladas to the US military. But post war, innovations in food packaging and technology had brought Americans such wonders as the TV dinner. They were over old-fashioned canned Mexican meals.

GRABER: The time was right for a ready-to-assemble, just add meat taco kit. Old El Paso was the first to launch such a thing, in 1969.

PILCHER: You know, housewives who are looking for something you know, that’s exotic, bring Mexican food home. Because, you know, people weren’t eating out all that much. But, you know, people wanted to mix up their meat and potatoes dinners by having tacos. That the taco shell, and Old El Paso’s version of it, becomes sort of the go-to model for sort of how to do that.

[SALOON PIANO]

VOICEOVER: There was trouble in Old El Paso… Texas Rose’s cooking was so dull, the boys was fractious! Fortunate, Rose had learned that Old El Paso tacos was excitin’. And quick! Simmer beef with taco seasoning. Use old El Paso taco shells and mild or hot taco sauce. Them tacos was so good, they saved the day! …Almost. Old El Paso—something exciting for a change!

PILCHER: It wasn’t the only one, but it was the one that’s, you know, kind of most successful, and really defines the market.

GRABER: The kit made it really easy, and those hard corn tortillas—they’re not fried in the moment, they’re pre-fried like Doritos, or potato chips, and they’re totally shelf stable. They were a little hard to eat, they broke almost as soon as you bit into them, but it was fun.

TWILLEY: More importantly, it was an easy, and easily customizable, dinner, so for a lot of families, it joined the rotation.

KIDS: Boredom is banished, with the first bite-

COWBOY: Thanks to the bright yellow box! The box is a kit-

KIDS: The kit is a hit!

COWBOY: For dinnertime fun, Old El Paso’s the one!

PILCHER: I think what’s happening is that, you know, this is a time when people are looking to broaden their culinary horizons. Mexican food is, is becoming more interesting to people. And that the taco shell, the taco meal is a way of presenting that.

GRABER: They became so popular they even got their own night of the week!

MRS. HOOVER: It’s Tuesday, Lisa. Taco Tuesday

[SCHOOL BELL]

KIDS: [CHANTING] TACO TUESDAY! TACO TUESDAY! TACO TUESDAY!

TWILLEY: So by the 1980s, tacos were a fixture on the American fast food and family dinner scene. They were not necessarily tacos that a Mexican would have recognized as part of their national cuisine. But they were very popular. Meanwhile, in England, where I was just a tiny child, there were no tacos.

GRABER: It took a new generation to bring American-Mexican tacos to the rest of the world. This time it wasn’t Taco Bell, it was Taco Bill.

TWILLEY: Specifically, Bill Chilcote who was a Californian surfer.

PILCHER: Surfers are people who would go down to Baja California and, you know, they didn’t have a lot of money and so they’d be buying tacos. And then as they, you know, traveled the world, looking for that perfect wave, they would bring Mexican food with them.

GRABER: Bill Chilcote traveled from California to Queensland in Australia, near the Great Barrier Reef, to catch some waves. He brought a corn grinder and a tortilla machine along with him, because he was pretty sure that he could just improvise the tacos from there.
TWILLEY: And the result was: Taco Bill.
ANNOUNCER: The 2010 I Love Food Award for Australia’s favorite restaurant goes to…

[ECHO, DRUMROLL]

ANNOUNCER: Taco Bill’s! [CHEERING]
TWILLEY: The first Taco Bill opened its doors on Queensland’s Gold Coast in 1967, and as you can hear, it’s still popular today. There are a couple of dozen of them across Australia.
GRABER: Taco Bill opened other branches of the restaurant in Amsterdam and London and Paris. And he wasn’t the only one. Other people—some surfers, most definitely not Mexicans—they opened similar taco restaurants internationally.
PILCHER: And so I see these as being the first wave, if you will, of Mexican restaurants around the world.

TWILLEY: These were specifically taco places, not Mexican restaurants. They had a vibe all of their own: basically tacos, tequila, party.

PILCHER: And it’s really much later that Mexicans start to travel, and, and really get annoyed to find, you know, Mexican-American food claiming to be Mexican. And then they start setting up restaurants to try to sell authentic Mexican food. And I think that’s actually now spreading, although it’s an uphill battle.

GRABER: Because the party taco, and the Old El Paso taco kit, caught on all around the world and have really come to define the taco. The taco kit is so popular in Norway that it also has its own day of the week, but instead of Taco Tuesday the Norwegians have Taco Friday.

TWILLEY: My sister in law is Norwegian and her mother remembers the Old El Paso taco-fest being the hottest trend of the late 1970s. These tacos had a distinctly Norwegian twist.

PILCHER: Yeah. The taco in Norway is your basic taco shell with hamburger meat. But instead of the sort of cheddar cheese that you might get in the United States, they actually have white cheese. And then they put, as the piece de resistance, canned corn. Right? So you get your double corn there in the Norwegian taco.

GRABER: The French version of the taco is even less taco-like.

WOMAN: May we introduce… the fast food pride of France: French tacos. …Excuse me? That’s no taco.

[MEXICAN MUSIC]

WOMAN: This is a taco.

[RECORD SCRATCH]

WOMAN: Nope, not in France. Here, a taco—or in French, a tacos—is a flour tortilla stuffed with various meats, sausages, and French fries. All put together to make a favorite fast food.

PILCHER: Although it’s actually not—doesn’t look a thing like a Mexican taco. And it’s like a Middle Eastern, it’s really kind like shawarma, only they put the word taco on it. And again, I think that, you know, it has absolutely nothing to do with any kind of Mexican or anything. It’s just they like the word taco.

TWILLEY: I think adding French fries to anything is a win. Much better than tinned sweetcorn.

GRABER: But I have to say—does calling it a taco make it a taco? Doesn’t a taco have to be a tortilla, with filling and salsa in it?

RUVALCABA: Of course not. I have never been to Korea, but we have a Korea town here in Mexico City, and tacos there are made with lettuce. At Chinese restaurants they’re made with rice paper. So, yeah, no. No, not at all.The thing is the wrapping it.

TWILLEY: It’s all one big beautiful taco world, and we’re just living in it!

GRABER: So based on this definition, then a burrito would definitely be a version of a taco.

TWILLEY: And Jeffrey told us it is. In the same Mexican dictionary that also included the taco for the first time, the burrito was defined as, quote: “a rolled tortilla with meat or other things inside,” which in Cuernavaca and Mexico City, is called a taco.

GRABER: Jeffrey says the burrito became less and less popular in Mexico as the taco’s popularity skyrocketed. But it survived in the American southwest and in California, where it also became inextricably linked to the wheat tortilla.

TWILLEY: It’s like a taco in exile. And if a burrito is a taco, then a chimichanga is a taco too, because that’s just a deep-fried burrito.

GRABER: Basically, it’s all vitamin T—but instead of tortilla, it’s all taco. The burrito, the fajita, the chimichanga, these are all tacos, and they’re all popular American-Mexican dishes, served in Tex-Mex and Cal-Mex style restaurants. But Mexican-Mexican restaurants have also become really popular these days, and they serve tacos, too. It’s not just street food anymore.

RUVALCABA: I remember, like 25 years ago I was talking to Enrique, Olvera. I remember, Pujol, his restaurant, was a very young restaurant. And I remember, I told him, you should, you should serve tacos de suadero.

TWILLEY: For context here, Enrique Olvera is one of Mexico’s most celebrated chefs, and his flagship restaurant, Pujol, is one of the world’s most highly regarded restaurants. It has two Michelin stars. It’s fancy. It is not a taqueria.

RUVALCABA: He said if I sold tacos de suadero, nobody would come back to Pujol. But something happened around the turn of the century. Just, people just… got used to it. Got used to tacos. And they just said, it’s all right to eat tacos at the restaurant.

GRABER: And now you can get a taco on the street and you can get a taco in Pujol.

TWILLEY: And both are delicious! The taco has risen to glory while maintaining its street cred.

RUVALCABA: The appeal is, I think they’re very easy to eat. They’re very comfortable to eat. They… eat well while you are walking. They are open to all flavors. Everything that is edible, everything that is edible, can end up in a taco.

TWILLEY: And pretty much every taco that we saw in Mexico, we ate. We had tacos filled with cactus, we had breakfast tacos with scrambled eggs and hot sauce, we had tacos with huitlacoche and squash blossoms. And we even had some of those high-end sit-down restaurant tacos that Alonso was talking about.
‘
GRABER: This is a really beautiful duck taco with also a salsa borracha,

TWILLEY: They’re also very nicely sized, like this is a hand sized taco.

TWILLEY: Mmm!

GRABER: Mmmm.

TWILLEY: That’s pretty great.

GRABER: Mmm. I might marry this taco.

[MUSIC]

GRABER: Thanks this episode to Alonso Ruvalcaba and Jeffrey Pilcher, we have links to their books on our website, gastropod.com. You can also find some photos of our taco adventures.

TWILLEY: Thanks also to the awesome Rodrigo Perez Ortega, who is an amazing science journalist and who helped us with our reporting in Mexico. And of course thanks to Claudia Geib, our super producer.

GRABER: Don’t forget that we’re hosting a Gastrohang on October 8, and you know you want to come join us! Go to gastropod.com/support or to our Patreon page to find out how to get on that list. We’ll be sending out the invites later this month.

TWILLEY: So don’t miss out! And we’ll be back with a new episode in a couple of weeks—stay tuned!