THE CRUNCH BUNCH

How Taco Bell fired the first shot in the stunt-food wars.

- ANTONIA HITCHENS

Lois Carson always wanted to find a new way to fold a tortilla. “Life’s like an experiment to me,” she said. For twenty-three years, when she worked for Taco Bell as a product developer, she thought and thought about how a tortilla might be wrapped around taco fillings in the shape of a hexagon. She wanted people to be able to pick up the stuffed tortilla with one hand, even while driving, without it falling apart. “It was just something that came into my mind,” she said, seated in a booth at a Taco Bell in Orange County, California. Carson is seventy-three and wears glasses, pink lipstick, and a Timex watch. She started her career in the nineteen-seventies, working in the kitchen at Perino’s, an Italian restaurant in Hollywood frequented by movie stars, where she devised methods to reconstitute the company’s frozen entrées for the microwave age. During her time at Taco Bell, she filled her lab book with sketches annotated with notes on the “build” of the potential hexagonal tortilla product, entering measurements of ingredients into a food-cost model. She practiced the fold technique studiously. “It’s like Thomas Edison and the light bulb,” she said. “He came up with an idea how many times? He made so many tries.”