Is Taco Bell Not Beef?

I apologize for the title, which sounds like a line from Shylock’s “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” speech in The Merchant of Venice. An Alabama law firm is alleging that Taco Bell’s beef, well, doesn’t legally qualify as beef. (To be exact, they found it to contained under 35% beef, the remainder a melange of wheat oats, soy lecithin, modified corn starch and a shit ton of chemicals.) Let’s keep it real, though: We all saw this coming.


I mean look at a burrito above. Even in an advertisement, where the food is supposed to appear a thousand times more delicious than it actually is, the “beef” still looks like a bunch of Pop Rocks the photographer spray painted brown. Beef doesn’t work that way! When fried, it clumps together in big, chewy balls of artery-clogging deliciousness that briefly let you forget the hell that is your life. It doesn’t pour freely to fit a mold like grains of kitty litter.


Honestly, I’m just relieved they didn’t find cow brain or other bits of the bovine that contain high concentrations of Mad Cow. I live in constant fear of contracting that disease, but I lack the willpower to give up the fast food which contains it. So, in spite of my beliefs that the US Government is completely corrupt and in bed with big business, every time I pass through a drive through, I manage to convince myself that the USDA is looking out for me, Johnny Taxpayer, and in no way letting the beef industry feed me tainted meat long enough to down whatever 75 grams of saturated fat I picked off the menu. Let it never be said I’m not a complicated man.

Tagged as: Fast Food, Taco Bell.