The New Globalization: the French Tacos

The French tacos – always with the audible "s", even when it's only one – is the latest new food thrown up by the worldwide blending of cultures. Dismissed by French culinary authorities as un sandwich diététiquement incorrect, they have nonetheless swept the nation. And unlike the previous big new food in France, kebabs, they have no particular point of origin and therefore no special association with any ethnic group. Lauren Collins explains:

Technically, the French tacos is a sandwich: a flour tortilla, slathered with condiments, piled with meat (usually halal) and other things (usually French fries), doused in cheese sauce, folded into a rectangular packet, and then toasted on a grill. “In short, a rather successful marriage between panini, kebab, and burrito,” according to the municipal newsletter of Vaulx-en-Velin, a suburb of Lyon in which the French tacos may or may not have been born. . . . 

According to the municipal newsletter, the French tacos, as a dish with a Mexican name and a Greco-Turkish influence, “embellished with fries as in Belgium, shakshuka as in the Maghreb, and French cheese,” amounts to “the culinary portrait of a global city like Vaulx-en-Velin.”

Emerging from the banlieues of southern cities, they have swept the nation, which now has thousands of tacos restaurants. Besides the usual French snobs, this is also offensive to some Mexicans, who regard these non-tacos as sacrilege.

I say, of course, eat what you want, and may a thousand flowers of cultural appropriation bloom across the globe.