Tacos

A taco is a Mexican food made of a tortilla folded or rolled around a filling. The tortilla is a thin, flat round of bread, usually made from corn or wheat flour. Inside, a taco can hold meat, beans, cheese, vegetables, salsa, or almost anything else. Tacos are eaten with the hands. They are one of the most popular foods in the world today.

Tacos come from Mexico, where people have been eating corn tortillas for thousands of years. The Maya and the Aztecs grew corn long before Europeans arrived in the Americas. They ground the corn into dough and cooked flat rounds of it on hot stones. Spanish explorers in the 1500s wrote about Indigenous people in Mexico folding tortillas around fish, beans, and small game.

Nobody is sure where the word "taco" comes from. One popular idea is that Mexican silver miners in the 1700s used the word for small paper bundles of gunpowder they stuffed into rocks. Wrapped tortillas looked a lot like those bundles. Other historians think the word has older roots in Indigenous languages. The argument is not settled.

There are many kinds of tacos. Tacos al pastor are made with pork that is stacked on a tall spit and slowly roasted, then sliced thin. The style came to Mexico from Lebanese immigrants in the 1900s, who brought a similar way of cooking lamb. Tacos de carnitas hold slow-cooked pork. Tacos de pescado, or fish tacos, are popular along Mexico's Pacific coast. Street vendors all over Mexico sell tacos to people walking by, often topped with chopped onion, fresh cilantro, lime juice, and salsa.

Tacos became popular in the United States in the early 1900s, brought north by Mexican immigrants. American cooks started making their own version with a crunchy folded shell, ground beef, shredded cheese, lettuce, and tomato. This is sometimes called a hard-shell taco or a Tex-Mex taco. Many Mexican cooks point out that this is not how tacos are usually made in Mexico, where soft corn tortillas are far more common.

Today, tacos are eaten almost everywhere. You can find taco trucks in big cities, taco nights in school cafeterias, and Tuesday taco specials at restaurants across the United States. The shape is simple, but the fillings keep changing as different cooks add their own ideas. A taco can hold almost any food, which may be the secret to why it has lasted for so many centuries.