It’s 2:07 a.m. on a Thursday night and you’ve finally finished your 10-page essay for Postcolonial African Literature. Two of your sisters have just come in from a night of fraternizing and you know (thanks to the help of GreekLifeEdu) that they should eat something. Come to think of it, you have been working on your essay all day and you haven’t eaten anything either.
As you begin to feel the "hangriness" settle in, you consider your options: microwavable Mac & Cheese (although your microwave doesn’t actually work), last week’s pizza that you stole from the dining hall (is that mold?), and Taco Bell (because it’s the only place that’s open). Clearly, T-Bell is the right choice. So, you lure your sisters into your car with promises of extra Verde sauce and venture the 2.4 miles from your campus to the one Taco Bell in town.
Sure, there have probably been studies explaining why Taco Bell is actually the worst thing for your health (drunken or sober), and your stomach might hate you the next morning. However, there’s something about Taco Bell that makes it more than a fast-food pit stop: it’s an experience. Karen Smith got it right when she asked, “Do you want to do something fun? Want to go to Taco Bell?” Perhaps this experience is centralized in the drive-thru line, in which you have time to really talk to your sisters. One could argue that there is no more appropriate place to casually bring up the freshman you’ve been *making out* with, or the other night when you were the one that threw up all over the dining room floor. It’s a safe environment in the T-Bell line, because no matter how angry your sisters might be about your vomiting, there exists a bond of frustration from waiting in line for 15 minutes that keeps you all on the same team.
However, waiting in line does not encompass the T-Bell experience in its entirety: you still have to eat the food. So, when you’ve finally made it back to your srat house and open up your Crunchwrap Supreme (sub chicken instead of beef), you can at last breathe a sigh of relief as you see your sisters reaching into their paper bags for their nachos and, perhaps, a handful of sobriety. While eating and drinking Baja Blast, and laughing about how you all still need to attend your one Panhel meeting for the semester, the warm bubbles of sisterhood arise within you (hopefully it’s not gas). As Thomas C. Foster points out, “whenever people eat or drink together, it’s an act of communion.” Although this does not have anything to do with religion, breaking taco shells is an act of peace and sharing. Generally speaking, we tend to only allow ourselves to take food into our bodies with the people we feel the most comfortable with. Therefore, getting Taco Bell is as much an act of friendship and sisterhood as it is an act of consumption.
So while you’re contemplating your next fast-food run, or maybe you just want to hang out with a sister, I ask you: please consider Taco Bell. It may not be the best for your health, but it could be the best for your heart. Also, if you could please bring me back 12 packets of Verde and Caramel Apple Empanada, I’d deeply appreciate it.
