A Brief Essay on Mexican Food

College students, as a group, are not discerning eaters. Their philosophy is simple: if you can put it in your mouth, and it doesn’t kill you, it’s probably worth eating. They will eat anything, up to and including the cardboard that their pizza comes in. I am dead serious about that. After all, the quality of the pizza at most campus delivery spots is only a notch above cardboard. Why, then, shouldn’t they eat the box? It tastes the same and probably is a little more nutritious.

Why this indiscriminate gluttony? First of all, because college students are poor. Sure, there are some lucky folks who can coast through college because their great-great-great grandfather was lucky enough to get in on the ground floor of Standard Oil. The rest of us, though, protect our dollar bills as if they were our children. Our green, papery children, but our children nonetheless. We cling tightly to our cash. Every dollar you spend brings you one step closer to hawking your kidneys for textbooks.

Then there’s the issue of energy. Most college students keep ungodly hours, and the ones that keep godly hours probably aren’t having enough fun. The average college student’s schedule goes something like this. They wake up at 8, go to class at 8:30, attend classes until 4, do homework until 8, and then party until 7 the next morning. An oversimplification? Maybe. But a friend of mine did tell me that once during exams he went without sleep for 50 hours. “I started to float!” he told me cheerfully.

So, naturally, we college students need something to fuel our fast living. After all, nothing’s worse than passing out during a Poli Sci exam and awaking to find that you drooled all over your essay about the British parliament. This helps explain the enduring popularity of Red Bull on college campuses. Why else would students chug down a can of something that is chemically indistinguishable from steroid-laced motor oil?

Lastly, and most importantly, there’s the issue of greed. It’s a plain, simple fact. Most college students are, for the first time, free from the nagging demands of parents, doctors, and everyone else who is remotely concerned about the state of their arteries. Nutrition be damned! If a college student wants to make a sandwich out of a slice of pizza between two doughnuts, just like he’s always dreamed, no one’s going to tell him no. Soda with breakfast? That’s par for the course. In fact, the Coke is probably the healthiest part of the breakfast. It’ll be used to wash down an unholy mishmash of processed meats and cereal so sugary you go into diabetic shock just looking at it.

Just because college students are indiscriminate eaters doesn’t mean they’re completely tasteless, though. Yes, they will eat anything. But there are some foods they’ll search out more eagerly than others. There’s pizza, of course, but pizza is hardly a college student food. Pizza holds the unique status of universal junk food. No matter who you are, where you live, or what you do, you recognize pizza as the ultimate guilty pleasure. It’s bread! It’s cheese! It’s 90% grease! (Assuming you get the good kind of pizza)

No, the quintessential college food, as opposed to the all-around garbage that is pizza, is Mexican. It fits every college student criteria. It’s cheap. The Mexican restaurant I frequent at Chapel Hill has so many deals that sometimes they pay me to eat there. Truly! There’s half-price Mondays, and quarter-price Tuesdays, and then on Wednesday they cut their prices to celebrate some Mexican holiday that comes every Wednesday, and so on and so forth. If you go into a Mexican restaurant and you don’t see something on the menu that’s half-off, you’ve wandered into uncharted territory.

I haven’t even mentioned the chips, which are always free and will be brought to your table with such frequency that sometimes overeager servers will start cramming chips into your mouth while you’re still chewing. They’re an inescapable part of Mexican cuisine; you would no more have a Mexican restaurant without chips than without oxygen. It’s a natural law, like E=mc2 or Finders keepers, losers weepers.

Energy! God, yes, Mexican cuisine will get you jumping. Though they may give them fancy names like “fajita” and “burrito” and “taco” and “almodovar,” every Mexican dish is really the same thing. It is meat, wrapped in bread, covered in cheese. Sometimes there is something on the side, which something lumpy and brownish that might, at one point, have been a vegetable. Needless to say, this stuff is packed with carbs. When Dr. Atkins dropped acid, he must’ve had nightmarish visions of fanged chimichangas crawling up the walls. Mexican food is energy in edible form.

Then there’s the greed aspect, which, if you recall what I wrote a couple paragraphs back, is the driving force behind a college student’s appetite. Mexican food is not only cheap; it comes in huge, gut-busting, stomach splitting, duodenum distending portions. The last time I ate a Mexican restaurant, I ordered a burrito and ended up getting something that looked like the Hindenberg, as designed by an engineer who preferred bread and beef to aluminum and hydrogen.

The portion sizes at Mexican restaurants are so large they boggle the imagination. My imagination is being boggled as I write this. It is so boggled I canpoidfhgaodfh sorry about that. There are three portion sizes in Mexican food, and they are as follow:

1. Small—You can eat it all, but you’ll feel like you just swallowed a couple basketballs doused in cheese
2. Regular—You could eat until you’ve got pico de gallo coming out your ears, and you’d still have enough leftovers to fill up a couple suitcases
3. Large—God help you

I feel sorry for Mexico. It gets all the lousy parts of Mexican culture—the corruption, the drug abuse, the endemic violence. All the good stuff goes to America: sombreros, Santana, and Mexican food. But college students wouldn’t have it any other way. I mean, do you know how much a sandwich costs nowadays?