NoonEats: Tacos From Taco Bell

The Taco Bell name conjures to many either a chirping chihuahua or an image of less-than-mediocre Mexican-style food. Founded in Southern California in 1962, Taco Bell has grown successfully, with more than 5,100 locations in the United States, including one on Morris Avenue in Springfield. Its founder, Glen Bell, passed away this year at the age of 86.

I stopped in at the Springfield location a couple of weeks ago—my first experience with Taco Bell food in more than a decade. I am a Mexican food snob and was not looking forward to this lunch.

Several years ago, Taco Bell tweaked some of its items to create a healthier "Fresco" menu. In most cases, the chain replaced shredded cheese and sauce with a "fiesta salsa" of diced tomatoes, onions and cilantro to lower the calorie counts of seven of its menu items. Now, just as Subway has its "Jared" ads, making famous a man who claims to have lost weight on the chain's sandwiches, Taco Bell promotes "Christine," a woman who lost 54 pounds by cutting her overall daily calorie intake and eating items off of Taco Bell's Fresco menu.

I was curious to try these Fresco items, so I started with the Fresco crunch taco ($1.09). With 7 grams of fat and 180 calories, it consists of a crunchy, corn taco shell filled with seasoned ground beef, shredded lettuce and fiesta salsa. I hate to admit it publicly, but I enjoyed that taco. It went down quickly, gone before I realized it.

Perhaps author Michael Pollan's comments about fast food are true: "A lot of research has gone into the pleasure of the first bite," he said in a 2006 interview and has repeated many times since. "The pleasure is on a rapidly diminishing curve—the engineers haven't yet figured out how to sustain that pleasure."

The pleasure of that first Fresco crunch taco did in fact rapidly diminish, as I unwrapped my second item, a grilled steak soft taco ($2.19). I thought I had ordered the Fresco version of this taco, but I was served the regular version, which consists of a soft flour tortilla filled with carne asada steak, shredded lettuce, cheddar cheese, diced ripe tomatoes and avocado ranch sauce.

This regular version gave me a whopping 250 calories and 14 grams of fat (compared to 160 calories and 4.5 grams of fat in the regular version), and I didn't even enjoy it. The shredded cheese may have been worth the extra fat and calories, but I certainly could have gone without the milky, not-so-tasty "avocado ranch" sauce.

From soybean oil and avocado pulp to calcium disodium EDTA and FD&C Blue #1, that avocado ranch sauce lists 12 lines of ingredients on the the Taco Bell Web site. A lot of effort seems to have gone into engineering a sauce that does not even taste good. I would much rather have some diced avocados and perhaps some sour cream on my taco. I'll give Taco Bell some credit for comprehensively listing all ingredients on its Web site.

Browsing further the descriptions online, I found it funny that Taco Bell feels it necessary to use the adjective "real" in front of cheddar cheese—as if there's a doubt in our minds that perhaps it is not real cheese.

Putting Michael Pollan's fast food theory to a further test, I stepped back up to the counter and ordered an additional Fresco crunch taco, just to see what my impressions might be the second time around. This time, I zeroed in on the orange grease of the ground beef and the taste of some probably powdered, packaged marinade mix. It was definitely not as good as the first, and I spent the rest of the afternoon feeling a little uneasy about all that I had ingested on my lunch hour.

Taco Bell may have its place as an inexpensive meal option for people looking for some guilty fast food or, better yet, for people looking for some empty carbs and grease to soak up a night's worth of alcohol. But if you're looking for a wholly satisfying lunch, it's best to stay away.