According to this week's cover story, written by Gustavo Arellano, San Francisco played a surprising and key role in the spread of Mexican food across America. The story is an excerpt from Arellano's new book, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, which comes out this week. Arellano's book celebrates the canned tamales, hard-shell tacos, and Mission burritos that Americans have fallen in love with, as well as the Mexican Americans who created them (whether credited or not).

SFoodie had a chance to speak to Arellano, who is also editor of the OC Weekly, several days ago. Part 1 of this interview, about San Francisco tamales and burritos, ran yesterday. In part 2, Arellano talks about tacos, bacon-wrapped hot dogs, and that awful A word, "authenticity."

SFoodie: If tamales and chile con carne were the first Mexican foods to go mainstream here, what role do tacos play in the spread of Mexican food around America?

Arellano: The taco is a relatively late migrant. Mexicans have been putting something in a tortilla and eating it since the time of the Aztecs. But the first documented picture of a taco in the United States appeared in a 1914 cookbook of California Mexican-Spanish dishes by Bertha Haffner-Ginger. It's what we would know as a taco dorado. Tacos don't started getting mentioned in newspaper stories and put on menus until late 1920s. Soft tacos are really a dish of Central Mexico, and it wasn't until the Mexican revolution until people who ate tacos in their daily lives migrated to the United States.

Tacos first made it to the Southwest, of course. Then in the 1950s, once companies started looking for the next hamburger, interest in tacos explodes in earnest with Taco Bell and its imitators. That's a hardshell taco, of course. It wasn't until the 1980s that the taco that most of us call a taco became widespread, as more Mexican immigrants came into the country.

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Gustavo Arellano.

San Francisco has gotten used to thinking of itself as a remote outpost in the Mexican diaspora, since our lively but embattled Mexican American community is dwarfed by much larger ones in Los Angeles and the Southwest. But according to this week's cover story, written by Gustavo Arellano, San Francisco has played a key role in convincing the rest of the country to adopt two Mexican American dishes, tamales and burritos, as their own.

SFoodie: Were tamales the first Mexican dish to be assimilated into American cuisine?

I would say yes, because the first two Mexican foods to achieve widespread popularity were chile con carne and the tamal -- specifically the tamal that came from tamale men from San Francisco. The tamal had existed across the American Southwest, of course, but up until the early 1890s it never had nationwide traction. It was really Robert Putnam and his California Chicken Tamale Co. who set out to conquer Chicago, spread a tamale frenzy there, then spun off to New York and inspired all those imitators.

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She's laughing with her salad because she didn't buy that Audi after all.

A couple weeks ago, New York magazine ran a profile of "young foodies" who shocked the reporter by spending up to 25 percent of their disposable income on restaurants and artisanal, well, anything. Twenty-five percent! 

As the New York Times recently reported, a new study conducted by a group of San Francisco State University researchers has found that these spendthrift food types may be happier because of it. The researchers asked 10,000 people to fill out a survey about personality and purchasing habits. The respondents who spent their money on things -- practical or no -- tended to be less satisfied with their lives, while those who spent more money on experiences like meals and travel were more outgoing, bigger risk takers, and more content. Screw that car repair -- SFoodie is contemplating making reservations at La Folie as we speak. Who needs brakes?

Illustration: Jesse Lefkowitz

In this week's cover story, Joe Eskenazi tackles the crazy logic behind California's laws regulating whether foods are subject to sales tax or not. Most people know the basics: Foods sold for preparation at home are not taxed and foods eaten outside the home are taxed. But the practical implications of that statement are similar to those of the statement "Good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell." The State Board of Equalization must engage in Talmudic feats of logic to determine which foods are taxable and which are not -- and even whether a substance counts as food:

A hot sandwich to go would be taxable, while a prepackaged, cold one would not -- but a cold sandwich becomes taxable if it has hot gravy poured onto it. Cold foods to go are generally not taxable -- but hot foods that have cooled are taxable (meaning a cold sandwich slathered in "hot" gravy that has cooled to room temperature is taxable). Cold, non-carbonated, non-alcoholic beverages to go aren't taxable. Hot beverages to go are, but coffee and tea are specifically exempted from taxation. Soup, however, is taxable. Hot soup that has cooled? Still taxable. But, the BOE specifically informs SF Weekly, cold soups such as gazpacho are exempt.

Worse yet, these tax laws, which are meant to benefit the poor, actually may penalize them. Eskenazi's proposed solution -- taxing all food and giving lower-income Californians a food-tax credit -- isn't just a pipe dream, either: It seems to work for Hawaii.

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Tell us how this man is engaged in an ethical pursuit.

Frank Bruni.

​Seems about as obvious a chain of events as Paula Deen getting type 2 diabetes, doesn't it? Wait, didn't gout disappear in 1782? (The restaurant critic writing this post grows a little sweaty, flexes toes to make sure they're not producing burning, stinging pain.) More >>

​You may pledge allegiance to your favorite lonchera and swear that you'd never eat Taco Bell's new Doritos Locos Taco, but if your grandparents weren't born in Guerrero or Sinaloa, your love for la comida auténtica is due, in part, to Glen Bell Jr. That's what Gustavo Arellano, author of the forthcoming Taco USA, argues this week on the OC Weekly's food blog, where he honors the international fast-food chain's 50th anniversary.

A product shot of what Beef Products Inc. calls "lean beef" and others call "pink slime."

​Pink slime -- aka "lean finely textured beef," meat salvaged off the carcass through a process of heat, centrifuging, and ammonia-gassing -- is the bugaboo of the day, as impossible to avoid in the media as it apparently is in hamburgers. It's a story that hits most of the sustainable food movement's talking points: the unappetizing secrets behind many processed foods, the lengths to which the meat industry takes to keep costs low, the close ties between government and industry (the USDA undersecretary who allowed pink slime to become an unlabeled ingredient later made $1.2 million as a BPI board member). And the children! Think of the children. More >>

Apparently, "weeds" play an important part of the ecosystem. Who knew? 

Lisa Keating Photography

Tanya Holland, of Brown Sugar Kitchen and B-Side BBQ.

​Yesterday, the Chicago Tribune asked a question of its city's chefs and restaurateurs that could also be asked in the Bay Area: Why are there so few black chefs working in higher-end restaurants? As reporter Christopher Borelli phrased the problem, "Interviews with scores of black chefs and restaurant professionals eventually circle back to this constant: Their entire careers, regardless of where they cooked, they've usually been the only African-American in the kitchen, and black mentors are far and few between." The reporter centers his piece on the new executive director of a cooking school who is making it a priority to place his students, 90 percent of whom are African American, in Chicago's top kitchens.Some chefs mentioned a stigma in the African American community against cooking, seen as another form of domestic service. In a sidebar, Borelli also spoke to Tanya Holland, a former Food Network star who now owns Oakland's Brown Sugar Kitchen. Holland is one of the few chefs interviewed who reported outright racism -- "I was in the soul kitchen, so they wanted me to act sassy. I'm from suburbia, I'm educated," she said. Many more cited the fact that young black chefs weren't exposed to the culture of high-end restaurants and given support from mentors already in the business.