Found Objects, Vol. 4
Miniature visits with items that say something about the world they occupy. Today: The Doritos® Walking Taco.
A FEW YEARS BACK, my older son and I stopped at a Sheetz convenience store for some lunch (don’t judge). He ordered a "walking taco” — what I grew up calling a Frito pie.
For those of you unfamiliar with the breed, it is basically this: Take a small bag of corn chips or tortilla chips, crush them up, throw some meat or cheese or lettuce or salsa on top, and … voilà! Informal taco in a bag.
So I was a bit dispirited to notice that the Doritos that formed the bedrock of the walking taco were contained in a special horizontal, reinforced, wide-mouth package carefully constructed specifically for the purpose of dumping the ingredients in on top of the chips.
Why did this not sit right with me? It was simply a more efficient, better produced version of an ad hoc idea, right? A better mousetrap. Is that not the American way?
On one hand, absolutely. The very reason we have companies like Frito-Lay (a subsidiary of PepsiCo) is because someone took something from homemade to local to regional and then to national and, in time, to multinational. That's a success story.
And yet …
Something is lost in this process. Call it the ingenuity of informality, or the flair of folk art.
SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE once thought to themselves, "You know, if I dump this meat and this cheese into this packet of chips and then eat it with a fork, I will create something new." It was, in its own way, delightfully subversive: Cut open the bag, turn it into a bowl and do what you want with it. Hijack the professional packaging with your own process. Guacamole, sour cream, tomato, jalapeños — the sky's the limit.
But when we professionalize and mass-produce that exact same notion, the ad hoc nature of it disappears just slightly. And we find ourselves at risk of forgetting the grassroots ingenuity from which it most likely sprung.
I am reminded of the day, years before, when I took that same child and his friends to “LegoFest” in Pittsburgh’s convention center. We walked in to this giant room brimming with Legos.
Taking up most of the marquee space were these enormous, elaborate Lego sculptures built brick by brick from careful scripts pulled straight from the comics, TVs and movies. Batman. Bart Simpson. Indiana Jones. Darth Vader. Woody from “Toy Story.”
Further into the room, on a comparatively tiny carpet, was featured a “free play” area full of random Lego blocks that kids could use to build things that they dreamed up on their own, unmediated.
Guess which area was FAR more jammed with excited kids?
WHEN YOU POINT out the ways that prefab storylines are conquering the world, you risk coming across as a curmudgeon. We live in a world of brands and ads and unremitting marketing algorithms. So what else is new? Live with it, right?
But as with so many things, something intangible is lost when the unscripted tiptoes into the scripted. Though I couldn’t articulate it as a kid, I loved the handspun ethos behind slicing open a bag of Fritos across its front and stuffing it with random taco fixings. I wasn’t inventing anything, but I was kind of making something.
Even though the only thing that’s different is the shape of the bag and the labeling on it, today’s packaged “Walking Taco” containers of Doritos, with their calibrated “On the Go” logo on the front, remove something intangible — yet important — from the equation. The brand identity was already standing smack in the middle of my childhood experience — we did call it Frito pie, after all — but now the company has colonized yet another step of something that still felt kind of informal.
I suppose this is the mass culture-era curse of Generation X as it ages: “Well, we were more LIGHTLY branded than you are today, and we liked it that way!” (Cue cranky gnashing of teeth and gums.)
As I said, curmudgeon. That’s always the danger. But think about it for a moment. That’s all I’m asking. Small things get lost — things that matter just a little, but probably not enough to notice. The interstate highway is a lot faster, sure. But the back road can be a lot more fun.
Can you think of other informal things that have been “professionalized” and lost something along the way?
BONUS FACTOID: The sometimes reliable Wikipedia tells me that in California, walking tacos are sometimes called “pepper bellies.” I will be adopting that nomenclature henceforth.
Something cool from my youth that has been commercialized? Weed!
No judgement on Sheetz...other than it not being Wawa. Such is there difference between your Western and my Eastern PA (northern Philly burbs).