Walking Taco

At a concession stand at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines on a Saturday in mid-August the vendor lifts a small foil bag of Fritos off a wire rack, takes a paring knife to the long seam, opens the bag from end to end, and tilts it slightly toward herself on the counter. A scoop of taco-seasoned ground beef from a steam-table well drops in on top of the chips. A pinch of shredded orange cheese goes on next. Shredded iceberg lettuce, a spoon of diced tomato, and a pull of sour cream from a squeeze bottle finish the build. A plastic fork is pushed into the centre of the heap, the bag is handed across the counter still warm to the touch, and the eater walks off eating from the bag.

The vessel is the design. There is no tortilla. There is no plate. The single-serve chip bag holds the load, plays the part of the starch, walls in the structure, and serves as the dish all at once. The chips at the bottom carry the weight until the eater scoops down through them, picking up beef and cheese on the chip in one pull of the fork. The bag flexes against the palm without spilling because the foil walls are stiffer than a paper boat and softer than a plastic plate. The standing-and-walking conceit the dish is named for is built around exactly that: foil bag in one hand, fork in the other, no surface needed, no plate to return, no fork to wash.

The crucial constraint is the chip's clock. The chips go from snap to soft to soggy within ten minutes of the warm beef and sour cream sitting on them, and the entire pleasure of the form is the contrast in the first half. A good walking taco hits the customer's hand with chips still cracking under the fork, the beef hot enough to steam, and the cheese already starting to slacken from the heat coming off below. Done badly the same vendor pours the load over chips that have been sitting in an open bag for ten minutes, the beef goes on lukewarm from a holding pan, the cheese never melts, and the sour cream pools at the bottom of the bag where the chips have already turned to wet paste. The shortest line at the fair is usually the best chip.

Chip choice changes the flavour profile more than any topping does. Plain Fritos lay down a clean corn snap and stay neutral against the seasoned beef. Doritos Nacho Cheese push a loud powdered-cheese flavour that competes with the cheese in the load and pulls the build toward an artificial register. Cool Ranch Doritos drag a herbal-buttermilk note across the whole thing. Tostitos Scoops sometimes show up in a homemade version, where the rigid cup shape changes the chip-to-load ratio toward more vessel and less crunch. The bag's brand decides the bite well before the toppings do, which is why the vendor calls the dish by the chip brand half the time: a Frito boat versus a Dorito boat versus a generic chip pie.

The variations track topping addition, not subtraction. A scoop of canned chili over the beef converts it toward the older Frito pie, the Texas concession cousin with chili and shredded cheese over Fritos in the same bag conceit. A heap of nacho cheese sauce from a pump makes it a movie-concession lookalike. Refried or chili beans in place of ground beef turn it vegetarian without changing the architecture. Jalapeños on top sharpen the heat. Pico de gallo in place of plain diced tomato sharpens the acidity. Guacamole in place of sour cream gives it a fattier register. The vessel and the fork stay constant; what changes is what gets ladled into the bag.

Two adjacent forms keep getting cited together and they are not the walking taco. The Tex-Mex hard-shell ground-beef taco is the same filling in a folded yellow corn shell, eaten with the hand, with a flat plate underneath; the chip-bag form drops both the shell and the plate. The Frito pie, served in a foil bag with chili and shredded cheese and onion since at least Texas concession stands in the mid-twentieth century, is the older parent the walking taco descends from but is a chili pie, not a taco-filling object. The Navajo fry-bread Indian taco, popularized at Navajo Nation fairs and adjacent pow-wows since the 1960s, is a separate fry-bread dish on a hot wheat dough disc and is treated under its own entry.

The Frito and the Fair

The chip is older than the dish. Charles Elmer Doolin bought the Frito recipe from a vendor named Gustavo Olguín in San Antonio, Texas, in 1932 and registered the Frito Company in October of that year. By the 1950s the Frito bag was a staple of Texas concession stands and the Frito pie, ground chili poured over Fritos in the bag, had appeared as a documented concession food at the Texas State Fair in Dallas and in school cafeterias across the Southwest. The chip-bag-as-bowl convention the walking taco runs on is the older Frito pie's contribution.

The walking-taco rebranding of the chip-bag bowl with taco fillings rather than chili is widely traced to Midwestern county fairs and school concessions through the 1980s and 1990s, when food courts at the Iowa State Fair, the Minnesota State Fair, and church and 4-H fundraisers across the upper Midwest standardized the swap. The phrase walking taco entered widely-read American food writing in the late 1990s; the older Texas name for the same approximate object was already Frito pie and the older New Mexico name was Frito boat, neither of which exactly mapped to the taco-filling version. The Santa Fe Woolworth's claim to the Frito pie, made on behalf of a counter cook named Teresa Hernández behind the lunch counter at the Woolworth's on the Santa Fe plaza, is a folkloric attribution; the cooking magazine and Frito-Lay corporate history record the dish on Texas State Fair menus before the Santa Fe claim is documented.

The dish has no inventor; the chip and the bag have a documented one. The Frito Company was registered by Charles Elmer Doolin in San Antonio, Texas in October 1932, the Frito pie at the Texas State Fair in Dallas is documented from the 1950s, and the chip-bag-as-vessel passed from chili-and-cheese to taco-and-cheese on Midwestern fair concession menus through the 1980s and 1990s.