Talking Taco

0:12Oh, don't mind us. We're just hanging out in Mexico City, ordering tacos from a little stand, as you do. This is my favorite taco stand in Mexico City. It's a vegan one called Por Siempre Vegana, and it was the first place Nikki and I went out to eat after we landed in Mexico. All right. You going first? Get in there. Okay. This one has beans. This one doesn't. This one has pineapple and all sorts of fun things. Oh, spicy. Mmm. So good. All right. I'm going to start. You started with the pasta or so I'm going to start with the big baby, which I can't even remember what it is, but it looks freaking amazing.

0:54That's hitting the spot. 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. 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? 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.

1:30So why did the taco only show up in the late 1800s? And how did Taco Tuesday, complete with hard shell tacos, hamburger meat, and iceberg lettuce ever become a thing? 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 8th, and you can get on the invite list at gastropod.com slash support. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater. Speaking of Eater, our friends at Eater turned 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.

2:12It's called Eater Off Menu. It's presented by Capital One, and it'll 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. Culinary talent includes legends like Sean Brock, Jason Wang, and Christina Martinez, and can't miss restaurants like Tatiana, Pizzeria Mozza, Momofuku, Carbone, Bar Contra, Honey's, Via Carota, and more. For tickets, go to eater.com slash off menu. At the Home Depot, get up to 15 % off all installed carpet projects for a limited time. Featuring brands like LifeProof, LifeProof with PetProof Technology, Home Decorators Collection, and Traffic Master.

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3:27Choose from our lineup of gut-supporting probiotics, and we've got occasional sleep support to help the whole fam chase their big dreams. Head back to class with the number one gummy supplement brand. Stock up on Oli.com today. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. It seems kind of ridiculous to ask, what is a taco? But we're going back to basics. Something that is wrapped, that is a food wrapped in some other food. It's a wrap. That's it. It's a universal. Alonso Rubalcaba is a writer in Mexico.

4:03City, and he wrote a book with Chef Enrique Alvera called Sunny Day's Taco Nights. And if aliens were to come, I'd just point at it. They're folded over food and said, that's a taco. Uh, so wait, is a calzone also a taco? Or an empanada? Or a Cornish pasty? Or can we narrow this down a little? 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. 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.

4:46Although that seems redundant because the salsa is kind of filling. But I think 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. So to have a taco, at least, Jeffrey thinks you really need a tortilla. And if you need a tortilla, then that means if you wanted a taco 3 ,000 years ago or 4 ,000 years ago, you were SOL. Because the earliest archaeological evidence for a Kamal, the griddle you cook a tortilla on, that only dates back 2 ,000 years. If the tortilla then becomes kind of the baseline definition of a taco, that's something you can't have a taco without, then it has to be, it certainly is no more than about 2 ,000 years old.

5:34Since the invention of the tortilla, there must have been taco-like foods where someone just wrapped the tortilla around a filling. The shape existed. The necessity to wrap foods in some kind of masa existed. they just had to find each other. And they did. But the question is, when and how? For a long time, people have woven stories about the origin 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 Salvador Novo. 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.

6:29And so it becomes a way of imagining or assigning to a food this kind of creation myth for the Mexican nation. 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. 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. 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.

7:17The closest thing to what we would think of as a taco now would be the envuelto, which is just Spanish for the wrap. It looks like a taco from the recipes we have for it, but something of a cross between a taco and an enchilada, so that it's a tortilla wrapped around something but then covered in salsa. 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? 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 so if you fold it in half, that's a possibility.

8:01There's itacate, which is kind of like a takeout food. And, you know, you can take out a taco. And so that's another possibility. 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. 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 cloth wadding, I guess you would say, that was used to put gunpowder into an early firearm.

8:49So what you do is you'd, you know, kind of pour gunpowder down the barrel and then you put this cloth to pack it in, to tack it in. Taco also came to mean the cue you used 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. 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 60 miles northeast of Mexico City. 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 then sort of pegging it into the rock face.

9:36They'd hollow out little holes with their picks, put it in there, light it. So it's essentially a little homemade stick of dynamite. And it would blast that out. 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. 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.

10:09And that was the lunch that they would carry with them. 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. 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.

10:47Apparently, 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. Fascinating. But Nikki, where are you going with this story? 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. 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.

11:28So I'm also guessing they just kind of shared their lunches. In any case, the miners of Real del Monte are the ones who started calling tortillas folded over a filling a taco. And Alonso said it's easy to tell 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. You have 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. At first, though, most of these tacos were just being eaten by miners.

12:11But 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. And of course, the nearest place that they could go was Mexico City. They brought their tacos with them, and by the late 1800s, the miners' wives started selling those tacos on the streets. 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 whatever's left. and sometimes they used to put them in a basket.

12:55So those were sweated tacos or tacos de canasta. Canasta means basket in Spanish and the sweated thing. Because they're kind of, you know, sitting there in their own steam. But originally they were referred to as tacos de minero, miners' tacos. More evidence that this new food, the taco, really does have its origins down the mines. 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. They're beans, chicharron, and potato. They're folded, and I don't know, the flavors just combine with one another. They are incredibly tasty, and they come with salsa verde or pickled chiles, pickled jalapenos, I think.

13:46And I do remember when I was about 15 that I got to know tacos de canasta. And I went crazy for those tacos and started eating them daily. Around a century before Alonso's revelation, many people were having the same experience. New taco 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 the ones who came to town with their minor husbands. What was happening in the early 20th century, late 19th century, was a big influx of people from all over our country trying to live in Mexico City and trying to adapt their foods to Mexico City food.

14:41What they did was take the vessel of the tortilla and just put whatever food came with them on those tortillas and just serve it as tacos. After all, the tortilla could hold all kinds of fillings. And tacos made the perfect street food. Because the tortilla contains not just the food, but also the way of eating it, right? It becomes a plate and silverware. It's just, you know, you put the food in the taco, wrap it up in the tortilla and eat it and you can walk away. And that's terrific. Jeffrey told us that by the early 1900s, these first taquerias were showing up in municipal records, but also in photos.

15:19We can look at pictures that were taken around 1900 of women on street corners. Some men, too, but mostly women with bowls set over little braziers. So the bowls have some kind of guisado, some stew, something that's cooking away. 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. Tacos 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 of nighttime tacos is not the same.

16:09What we call a la parrilla, when you have bistec, steak tacos, or rib tacos, and al pastor, those kind of drifted into the nighttime tacos. And guisados and canasta kind of stayed in the morning for the ladies to prepare them. But even beyond grilling versus stewing, the fillings started to really diversify in terms of ingredients and flavors. 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.

16:58You have the carnitas tacos from Michoacan, which is another state in Mexico. And tacos and mariscos, which can be shrimp tacos or fish tacos from the north in Mexico, from California, or tacos from the Yucatan, which of course existed there. But in Mexico City, they found this taco-friendly environment. The Yucatan tacos are called cochinita. They're pork that's been marinated in anato seeds and sour oranges. So it's both acidic and red, and it comes with pickled onions and habaneros. 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.

17:46And these tacos, which, you know, they're cooked on that vertical rotisserie just 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. They used lamb and they put them on flour tortillas. 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, I started using chilies, which were not in the original recipe. The other thing that makes Al Pastor one of the all-time great tacos is that it has pineapple in it.

18:36No one knows how the pineapple got in there, but everyone knows pineapple and pork taste great together, which is why I will defend the supremacy of the Hawaiian pizza to my dying breath. 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. And now, of course, they're on every street corner. They are the most, you know, quintessential authentic Mexican food. So in only a few decades, tacos went from being unknown to basically becoming totally ubiquitous in Mexico City.

19:07And from a potato filled minor 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. Support for this episode comes in part from NetSuite. AI is changing how business gets done, and NetSuite wants to help you keep up. You may already know NetSuite, the AI-powered business management suite that securely connects all of your data. It's a unified suite that brings your financials, inventory, commerce, HR, and CRM into a single source of truth, trusted by more than 43 ,000 customers. NetSuite Next is the next huge leap in how business gets done because AI is built into everything you do.

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20:28What's the best way to think about age in politics? You don't want to be ageist, right? I do think term limits are more important than age limits. Some old people are really sharp. Bernie Sanders is popping off and he's like, what, 2 ,000? I'm so fed up with the fact that most of our lawmakers are so old. The gerontocracy feels like a huge problem in American politics. We're now in our third oldest Congress in history. So why won't the boomers retire? I gave serious consideration last year to not run again. I asked 17-term Congressman Jim Clyburn that exact question. And I kept being asked, how do you feel?

21:12Clyburn, who turned 86 just this week, is running for re-election in South Carolina again. And I kept answering, I feel fine. And they said, well then, why would you quit? This week on America Actually, Congressman Clyburn makes the case for experience and the establishment.

21:35Why was every World Cup player wearing pink cleats? And what does it say about the future of advertising? Why does Alex Earle's butt look different to me? Have I been staring at her butt too long or too short? What are they putting in there? And is it cadaver fad? There's a lot to be said about butts these days, and it can all be said about Alex Earle. I went to see the Odyssey in IMAX, and I had to immediately go and find out why. What is IMAX 70 millimeter? Finally, Karlie Kloss. She's been out and about a lot more lately. Was she laying low on purpose? What is her plan? And how did she get invited to Taylor's wedding?

22:09We answer all these questions on more on this week's episode of Good Noticings. You can hear new episodes every Wednesday, everywhere you get your podcasts. Good night. And good noticings.

22:24Tacos seem 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. When I was growing up, it was this poor kid. The only thing he eats is tacos. They were looked down upon. It was a poor person's food. 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. Oh, there was a very negative view of corn. And it was just associated with the indigenous people who were viewed in a very negative fashion.

23:08And that if you were anybody in Mexico, you ate wheat bread, which was the foods of the Europeans. 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, sanitized version they could make at home. 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. 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.

24:06And wheat really didn't do so well in most of the country. 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. Oh, it spreads out very quickly. And we start to see regional specializations of tacos. 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. This is the northernmost part of Mexico in Sonora, just south of Arizona, where relatively few people lived when the conquistadors first arrived.

24:43Because 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 draw Spaniards north. 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.

25:20They just used wheat instead of corn. And the tacos spread even further north, into the borderlands that used to be part of Mexico. California, Texas, New Mexico. I mean, there are tacos being served in Texas and California already by 1906. These taco places were run by Mexicans and made for Mexicans. Mexican food wasn't popular with most non-Hispanic Americans at the time. 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. Yeah, it was a sort of a challenge. And just like eating with chopsticks for the Chinese restaurant, this was something that early tourists commented on.

26:03It took a white guy to introduce the taco to most of white America. That guy was named Glenn Bell of Taco Bell fame. Watch us make your food afresh at Taco Bell, Taco Bell. Can you feel your taste buds? King Taco Bell, Taco Bell. Glenn Bell grows up in Southern California in the town of San Bernardino, which is 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. It was about 1947, 48. Glenn had tried hauling bricks and running a miniature golf course, but hamburgers and hot dogs were having a bit of a moment in San Bernardino immediately post-World War II.

26:52At 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. 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. Meanwhile, the American food system was being industrialized.

27:36Meat 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. They're able to produce this very small menu in vast quantities, and they're selling them for like 10 cents each. And the people line up around the block to get this food. And Glenn Bell, like so many other people, is just astonished at this new industrial system for feeding people. But Glenn wasn't just checking out McDonald's. He was also eating at the local Mexican restaurants in San Bernardino, 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.