Is Taco Bell Cultural Appropriation? by Janice

With almost 10,000 locations across the United States, Taco Bell is extremely familiar and accessible. Most of us have tried a “crunchwrap supreme”, a “Baja Blast”, or a “Doritos Locos taco” at least once in our lives. But did you know that the founder of Taco Bell, Glen Bell, is not Mexican?

In fact, Glen Bell actually got his idea of Taco Bell’s famous hard shell taco from a restaurant in San Bernadino, CA that is still around today (Arellano, 2017). He used to go eat at Mitla Cafe every night, then go back home to try and re-create the recipe. So considering how Taco Bell came to be established, should Glen Bell’s act of copying a small restaurant to create his own multibillion-dollar chain be considered as cultural appropriation?

Is Taco Bell “cultural appropriation”?

Perhaps it is. From what I’ve learned, cultural appropriation happens when “a more privileged culture exploits another culture for their own benefit” (Oluo, 2019). By not acknowledging “the racial, ethnic, and cultural capitalist power structure in America”, cultural appropriation violates food justice and food equal opportunities (Kim, 2017). In the case of Glen Bell, he basically ripped off a small Mexican restaurant and claimed these “new” recipes as his own. But when food writer Gustavo Arellano interviewed the owners of Mitla Cafe, they seemed to be fine with it. Their restaurant was still doing really well and they said, “Our food is better anyway.” (Arellano, 2017). The creation of Taco Bell did not have any impact on their restaurant at all and they did not feel exploited in any way, so perhaps Taco Bell is not cultural appropriation.

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  Mitla Cafe and their hard shell tacos.

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However, I think what disturbs me the most about Taco Bell’s origin is how it benefitted from the power imbalance that exists in the restaurant industry. There’s this power structure that surrounds food, along with its consumers and producers, and it unfortunately creates more societal disadvantages and lack of opportunities for minorities and people of color (Kim, 2017). I personally find it unfair and upsetting that Glen Bell, a white man who has far more opportunities and societal privilege than people of color, started his own brand thanks to their recipe and did not even give any ounce of credit or compensation to Mitla Cafe. Glen Bell copied the idea of a hard shell taco and marketed it to mostly white consumers and even today, Taco Bell’s menu items all sound Americanized and even kind of racist with their play on words.

Taco Bell’s online menu.

Rick Bayless and “columbusing”

Speaking of which, this reminds me of another controversial white chef who popularized Mexican food. Similarly to Glen Bell and Taco Bell, Rick Bayless also “translated” Mexican food and tweaked their descriptions to be more “appealing to white people” for his upscale Mexican restaurant in Chicago, Frontera Grill (NPR Podcast). Bayless even admitted himself that he wanted white people to start eating more Mexican food, so he took recipes and made them sound “less frightening” with terms like “caramalized onions” (Saini, 2016). This could be considered as columbusing: “the act of reckless and thoughtless appropriation (typically of rich white people) of a thing that has been around for years or decades (a thing that usually belongs to non-white people)” (Portnoy, 2016).

Menu item description on Frontera Grill’s Instagram.

On a podcast, Bayless says that “people who think he cannot cook Mexican food because he is white are racists”. This is an example of “reverse racism” that Bayless was criticized for because he fails to recognize that an American-born chef like him has more privilege and “is more likely than an immigrant to have the connections and the means to grab investors or news media attention” (Godoy, 2016). I don’t think there’s anything controversial about the fact that Bayless is a white person who cooks Mexican cuisine for a living. He tries his best to be respectful of the culture and it’s good that he helped contribute to popularizing Latino food in the United States. I also learned that anyone has the right to represent or cook foods from a different culture or country (Godoy, 2016). However, Rick Bayless and Glen Bell should acknowledge that they “benefit from being a white male American with access to capital and a familiarity with a predominantly white and relatively wealth consumer base” and help out the Latino community in more ways than just profiting off their food (Saini, 2016).

Works Cited

Arellano, G. “Let White People Appropriate Mexican Food– Mexicans Do It to Ourselves All the Time”. OC Weekly. June 7, 2017.

Godoy, Maria. “When Chefs Become Famous Cooking Other Cultures’ Food,” NPR. March 22, 2016. 

Kim, Dakota. “We’re Having the Wrong Conversation About Cultural Appropriation,” Paste, June 6, 2017.

Oluo, Ijeoma. Chapter 10, “What is Cultural Appropriation?,” So You Want to Talk About Race, USC Library Online 

Portnoy, Food, Health, and Culture in Latino Los Angeles (2016). pg. 115-117. USC Library. Online.

Saini, Anne Noyes. “Other People’s Food: White Chef, Mexican Food” Podcast. Sporkful. March 21, 2016.