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In This Issue

• Kicking Your Hamster in its Teeth
• X-treme Zoos Target Market
• Resurrecting the Chili Cheese Burrito
• Sonic in Bad Shape
• Journey into the Land of the Leopards
• Finding Boys Into Whom to Put Love
• Lions and Tigers and Bears, Go Buy!
• Murder Spree Continues
• Art With Dead Mice
• Puppy Love, the Wrong Way
• 19th Century Nursery Rhyme!
• Tender Moments with Bill and Reona
• Bibu the Baby Elephant
• Rob's Relationship Corner
• Marauding Interviewer: What's Your Spirit Animal?
• THEY WATCH
• Letters to the Feditor
• Thyroid Boy
• Interspecies Intellectual Masturbation
• Stickman Theatre

Matt Holden

HOW will Chili Cheese Burrito escape?? WHO can save him?? IS this the end?? Tune in next week!

Michael Bredin

Ladies and Gentlemen, the new Taco Bell (Registered Trademark)!

Ah, to be seventeen and living on Long Island. In my hometown, every afternoon when high school let out at 2:30, our first stop was the wooded area behind the senior parking lot, where we'd walk just far enough to be off school property. The second stop was Taco Bell. The lighting was soft, the décor festive, the Gorditas fluffy and the Chalupas crunchy. They had just introduced the Grilled Stuffed Burrito, the Chicken Quesadilla and the Seven-Layer Nachos, taste sensations all. A Grilled Stuffed Burrito and a Dr. Pepper and a parking lot big enough to throw Frisbees in--it was everything a suburban kid could hope for.

But I also remember an earlier Taco Bell. In the early nineties, the menu had been different- much more Mexican, much less tender marinated chicken strips on crunchy grilled flatbread. My parents wouldn't go there because it was full of dirty low-class people who performed manual labor and spoke a different language from us. Popular items had names like "Hard Taco" and "Bean Burrito" that obviously had never faced a focus group. On Long Island, even the buildings had been different- the old ones, which looked kind of like kangaroo rat-infested crumbling Southern California missions, were almost all replaced in the late nineties with a new family friendly look, somewhere between McDonald's and the trendy, ultra-modernist Cali-Mex takeout chains that had recently spread like a plague from the West Coast.

About this time, I think actual Mexicans stopped eating there and Whitey moved in. Looking back, I see how I was suckered, with each mouth-watering Chalupa, into supporting mediocrity-promoting gentrification and the worst kind of melting-pot cultural politics. But at least it wasn't Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Have you ever really loved a burrito?

One menu item lost along the way was the Chili Cheese Burrito. It was made with the same homogenous brown slop as all of the other Taco Bell products of its generation, yet it had its unique audience. Somewhere between the white-bread monotony of Soft Taco and the mongrel bizarreness of Mexican Pizza, as hearty as Bean Burrito but with a little extra kick, the Chili Cheese Burrito was a keystone of the early nineties Taco Bell menu. Yet while these other staple products remain alongside the newer, fancier, more expensive products on today's gentrified menu, available as a "side dish" or a curiosity, the Chili Cheese Burrito has vanished from nearly all of the nation's Taco Bells.

Fittingly, the summer of 2004 saw the rise of a grassroots campaign of individuals dedicated to getting the Chili Cheese Burrito back on the Taco Bell menu. The website www.chilicheese.org has become the public face of this campaign. The site features Chili Cheese Burrito themed buddy icons, desktop wallpaper, and printable posters, as well as a petition to bring the Chili Cheese Burrito back as a regular Taco Bell menu item. The petition has collected over 5,000 digital signatures in the six months since its launch, a testament to the enduring popularity of the Burrito. One recent signer even claims to represent two soldiers fighting in Iraq who both miss the Chili Cheese Burrito very much.

Visitors to chilicheese.org have also donated over $250, in increments of $1.29 (the standard price of a Chili Cheese Burrito), to a new organization called The Culinary Crisis Coalition. The Culinary Crisis Coalition, in addition to working to bring back the Chili Cheese Burrito, also launched a campaign this fall to bring together lovers of McDonald's' McRib sandwich in hope of convincing McDonald's to make it a permanent, rather than seasonal, menu item. But McRib is totally gross and is not made of ribs anyway- so let's get back to the Burrito.

Where can I get one?

Continuing to carry the Chili Cheese Burrito is still an option for Taco Bell franchises in most locations, but few seem to have availed themselves of the opportunity. Chilicheese.org keeps a register of all of the Taco Bell location in the United States and Canada which have been confirmed to still carry the Chili Cheese Burrito. So far, only 5% of locations have been confirmed by the site as Chili Cheese carriers; it has been estimated that the overall percentage of Chili Cheese carrying locations may be as low as 10%. The only confirmed location listed in all of New York is on Flushing Avenue in Brooklyn. So get moving.

A Big Conspiracy?

I recently spoke to a current low-level Taco Bell employee who, apparently out of fear for his job, asked not to be identified by name in this article. He told me "I remember the [Chili Cheese] burrito. I hated making it... They say it's the simplest, but no, it's not." He continued in apparent frustration, "Look, if you need it that badly, all you do is ask for a beef burrito, no onions, no cheese, add nacho cheese." Sounds simple enough.

When I asked him about why a Taco Bell would choose not to carry the optional and tasty Burrito he told me, "That's company policy, I'm not allowed to talk about things like that, I'm sorry." When further pressed he still refused to speak, finally saying only, "I'm sorry. If you want a comment on something like that, you'd have to call 1-800-TACOBEL."

I most certainly will not.