Deadshirt

From their perch in Sharkatraz atop the tallest apartment building in Astoria, Max Robinson and Mike Pfeiffer and Special Guest Julian Ames are The Trash Boys. In The Trashford Files, they investigate and review foods that are normally best eaten alone drunk in the dark after a breakup.

The Gastronomic Artifact

What are we putting in our talk holes?

Max: The year is 2014. Taco Bell, riding a cocaine high from the massive, economy revitalizing success of the Doritos Locos Taco, has dedicated an expansive marketing campaign to…Breakfast. Waffle tacos. AM Crunchwraps. Breakfast burritos. Orange juice. Taco Bell challenging McDonalds for the passable egg product crown is a bold move from a fast food chain that barely has a solid understanding of ground beef.

Mike: McDonald’s has the Game Boy, this is Taco Bell’s Playstation Portable. Originally it seemed like they were just unveiling a single new menu item, the waffle taco, which we received blurry pictures of from well-wishers and haters alike. Then more menu items were revealed. Now it’s been one week since I’ve seen any surface in the city of New York that isn’t covered in Breakfast War propaganda, reminding us that the Fake Mexican Food wing of Pepsico is now capable of delivering the only one of four meals they couldn’t already serve out of a caulking gun.

Max: Just for the sheer volume of items here, we enlisted fellow Deadshirter Julian Ames to help us tilt at these sausage patty windmills.

Julian: As a regular consumer of fast food breakfasts and new resident of Astoria, I knew I would eventually be required to lend my digestive tract to the Trashford cause.

Mike: This wasn’t just a breakfast. This is a Garbrunch.

Presentation

How it look?

Max: Look at these assholes. When I look at the Waffle Taco, I feel like I’m looking at like…dollhouse food. It doesn’t look real?

Mike: With the exception of the Waffle Taco, which is designed to look like someone should get drug tested at the breakfast factory, the outside of the breakfast menu looks the exact same as a normal Taco Bell meal. Which is… sinister. This whole thing is colored by a basic distrust of Taco Bell.

Mike: Oh and it should be noted that the waffle taco doesn’t come with a sausage patty as advertised, it actually comes sprinkled in little sausage… nugs. Dank sausage nugs that I imagine coming out of the back of whatever hideous creature coughs up prescrambled eggs in foaming yellow gouts.

Max: Little orbs. Like sausage Dippin’ Dots. Eggs. They will hatch in me.

Julian: *shudders*

Taste

Does it satisfy?

Max: Guys. This is really hard to admit. We….We liked it.

Mike: Yeah, there was a moment where we were all contentedly cramming our maws with rearranged breakfast imitation filler and none of us were making faces and we came to the unfortunate conclusion that we were actually enjoying ourselves. The breakfast burrito was not unlike breakfast burritos my mom used to make me back in high school, so it retroactively makes me mistrust my mom.

Max: The waffle taco, especially with syrup on it, is fairly tasty. The bacon crunchwrap is a pretty good little egg and hashbrown throwing star. I’m really mad that I liked these. Congrats Taco Bell, you’ve finally found a way to make me hate myself.

Mike: Yeah it really sucks to prove people right about you. I get the same feeling about enjoying the taste of these stupid delicious little breakfast projectiles that I do when I find a ladies’ blazer with a tiger on it or something and I end up buying it. Like now I’m a caricature of myself and somewhere a painting of me is getting prettier.

Julian: I didn’t have such low hopes for Taco Bell’s breakfast as these two – I mean, how hard is it to screw up powdered eggs? But just to be sure, I took the biggest gamble and got the steak crunchwrap and it was actually pretty good; maybe a little too light on the steak, but then again, that could be what actually saved me and my intestines, who knows.

Max: Somewhere, that little rat dog from the old Taco Bell commercials is smiling down on us.

Practicality

How easy is it to put in your talk hole?

Mike: Troublingly simple. The strength of Taco Bell has always been that you can eat a million Units without tasting or thinking about it, and before I knew it I was done eating. I might as will have drank this meal through a straw.

Max: A surprising amount of thought went into the design and handling of these breakfast items. A disheveled lookin’ dude spends late nights at the office revising the curvature of a waffle taco shell – his children have forgotten his face and his wife knows the touch of another.

Mike: Yeah, rolling up a waffle into a taco and putting eggs and bacon in it is kinda basic level but I was really impressed by how they invented a Pee Wee Herman machine that pushes a potato through a tennis racket, passes it onto a cascade of oil and then drops a bust of Van Buren onto it so that it’s flat when it gets fried and can be used to line the bottom of a crunchwrap or thrown really hard to kill a Dragon Ball Z character.

Shame Factor

Would I eat this in front of a date or in a job interview?

Max: It’s funny, everything here isn’t any more embarrassing than like an Egg McMuffin AND YET Taco Bell Breakfast has such a honed reputation for garbage. You can probably get away with most of these since they’re hidden by tortilla, but Waffle Taco is basically the eating equiv of reading The Fountainhead on the subway – you look like an asshole.

Mike: I would say that this is definitely the most shameful thing we’ve ever eaten, which is seriously compounded by the fact that it was delicious and I’d eat it again. Basically the lead up to eating this breakfast involved every single person sending me and Max photos of the breakfast lineup like “Well, when are you going to finally finish your edible swan song?” We wanted this to be terrible, so badly. Instead it turns out that a multimillion dollar corporation can somehow manage to not fuck up eggs, bacon and cheese in a tortilla. And now I’m just scared.

Max: We have seen the breadth of our domain, there are no more worlds to conquer.

The Blood Test

The lab boys came back with the results.

Max: Mike’s bloodwork revealed that his blood still looks Fake and Not Real. It looks suspiciously like Taco Bell’s new “sangria” flavored Mountain Dew. When will we solve the mystery of his blood?

Mike: It’s fine! Stop saying that! It’s a deep burgundy and foams up just like everybody else’s.

Max: Thank you once again to our friends at Stan Winston’s creature shop for providing the “Mike” puppet.

Final Rating

Is it worth feeding your self loathing to purchase?

Max: In creating food that is both A) garbage B) actually pretty good, Taco Bell has destroyed us. Victory has defeated The Trash Boys. We need a massive genocidal asthmatic to break our spines over his treetrunk leg and send us back to the academy. An unprecedented, perhaps anti-climactic 5 out of 5 rats.

Mike: Yeah, this was a five-rat meal. I, on the other hand, deserve zero rats for being dirty water trash and actually enjoying going to Taco Bell for brunch when I live in the city of New York and I should be ordering off a prix-fixe, having a cronut topped with poached free-range organic quail eggs or something.

Julian: I think more needs to be made about how tentatively we were eating at the beginning, as if after every bite we were expecting to go blind or something. But the further we got into the breakfast, the more we realized that it was pretty damn decent. Now, I can’t in good conscience tell people to go and seek out Taco Bell’s breakfast menu, but I can say that if anyone wants to try it, no, it won’t hurt you, and you could probably do worse.

Max: Julian, how many rats would give this?

Julian: What?

Mike: How many….look this is our thing alright.

Julian: Four. Four rats. I guess.

 

Trashford Files banner art by Nick DiFabbio