Taco Trivia: 7 Fun Facts About Your Fave Food

Having a taco every day doesn’t make you a taco expert, we would know. It turns out that for people who know their way around a taqueria, we still have a lot to learn when it comes to the delicious taco. Here’s what we found out.

The taco goes back a long way.

According to Tacopedia (our favorite type of encyclopedia, a food-o-pedia!), tacos were invested between 1,000 and 500 B.C. as a kind of edible spoon. Makes sense: scooping up filling with a tortilla morphed into the tortilla serving as a vessel for it all along.

The word “taco” has an explosive history.

It seems that the word taco came about in the 18^th century in the silver mines in Mexico and it referred to the charges used to excavate. Then and there tacos were sheets of paper that wrapped around gunpowder and were placed in hold in the rock. The first reference to a taco came about in the 19^th century and it referred to tacos mineros.

Tacos have a racy origin.

The first mention of a taco in the United States can be found in 1905 in a newspaper. Then, tacos were associated with pushcarts in Los Angeles and a group of women called the Chili Queens, in San Antonio. These women were seen as “available”, according to one historian, and customers would flirt the Chili Queens and buy tacos. This also fed into the stereotype of Mexican food as hot and spicy, in more than way. [pagebreak]

We eat a lot of tacos.

In the billions, in fact. According to NationalTacoDay.com, Americans eat 4.5 billion tacos last year. The average Mexican eats 135 pounds of tortillas every year, according to Tacopedia. And according to CNBC, half of the U.S. population goes to Taco Bell once every 11 days!

Speaking of Taco Bell…

Glen Bell, the founder of Taco Bell, said he invented that famous deep fried U-shaped taco back in 1950. However, one historian found that U.S. patent office records show taco shell patents were awarded in the 1940s to Mexican restaurateurs. Regardless, that invention made fast food tacos popular and pushed tacos in the mainstream. And he wasn’t the only one to innovate. Fausto Celoria invested the first automated tortilla machine in 1947 – today, there are almost 79,000 mills and tortilla outlets in Mexico.

The taco belongs to one woman.

It’s true! In 1979, Mexican visual artist Maris Bustamante registered the taco as hers, reports Tacopedia. She also claimed the patent rights!

We found the taco of your dreams.

The biggest taco ever made, reports Tacopedia, was made on November 20,2011 in a town called Queretaro. It was 246 feet long and was filled with carnitas. We’re sorry we missed it.