The Death of God. A Dadaist Masterpiece. The Taco Bell Cheez-It Tostada
“No God created the Cheez-It Tostada. In fact, the Cheez-It Tostada assures us we have killed Him.”
Some say it began with the KFC double-down in 2010, a sandwich with bacon, cheese, and sauce as fillings — and two pieces of fried chicken fillet as buns.
Something changed back then. KFC flipped the script. They did away with conventions. They eschewed traditional norms. They abandoned decades of food preparation precedent in favor of stunt value.
The sandwich went viral, but eventually the novelty waned and it ceased to sell well stateside. The sandwich subsequently left American KFC menus in 2014, though it still appears every few years internationally.
The double-down was outrageous, but in retrospect, it presented only a minor sojourn away from the conventional path. It remixed the ingredients of a classic sandwich, a little more of this, a little less of that, but it did not fundamentally alter what already existed.
Next came the Doritos Locos Taco in 2012. Just a regular taco, but with a Dorito shell, the item was a smash hit.
At some level, the Doritos Locos Taco made sense. It combined the flavor of an existing corn chip with a product featuring a corn tortilla. The lasting success of this item made it clear to brands that merging existing snack foods with fast food items was a savvy move.
Pizza Hut tested that notion to the extreme in 2019 when the chain announced its own fusion product and reductio ad absurdum, the Stuffed Cheez-It Pizza.
A square of orange dough with a crunchy Cheez-It crust filled with Pizza Hut cheese and dipped in marinara, the creation was shadow of a shadow — both pizza and Cheez-It, but also neither.
Whereas KFC had rearranged and Taco Bell had combined, Pizza Hut alchemized. They created something new, something novel, something no one asked for and no one could explain.
The legacy of the Stuffed Cheez-It Pizza is reborn in the Taco Bell Cheez-It Tostada. It is a Cheez-It cracker, 16 times the original size, topped with ground beef, sour cream, lettuce, diced tomatoes, and shredded cheese. It is in the testing phase at a single restaurant in Irvine, California.
“There are few things that everyone can agree on…but the iconic flavors from Taco Bell menu items and Cheez-It snacks appeal to all,” said Liz Matthews, Taco Bell’s Chief Food Innovation Officer.
“God is dead,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in The Gay Science, “God remains dead. And we have killed him.”
Nietzsche explained that as the Age of Enlightenment and scientific rationality overtook the need for a divine explanation, Western civilization had no use for God. With the death of God, thought Nietzsche, would come the breakdown of values, the lack of moral order, nihilism.
Perhaps that has finally come to pass and the Cheez-It Tostada is nihilism’s harbinger. The dish represents our spiritual condition. No God created the Cheez-It Tostada. In fact, the Cheez-It Tostada assures us we have killed Him.
We now live in an increasingly atheistic society. Younger generations have also lost faith in many institutions like the government, the labor market, and marriage. The conventional path to success — find a good job, get married, have kids, buy a house — becomes estranged as job satisfaction, marriage rates, birth rates, and home ownership all decline.
We are living in what Emile Durkheim coined anomie, the social condition of normlessness. The standards of success defined by generations above no longer apply. What aspirations can we have when climate change threatens our existence, governmental bodies strip us of bodily autonomy, when we fear global war, and we have not yet escaped a pandemic that has claimed the lives of millions?
Maybe the Cheez-It Tostada is nihilism embodied. Or maybe it is something else.
In the 1920s, the art movement Dadaism arose in rejection of logic, reason, war, and capitalism. Works of Dadaist art embraced nonsense and irrationality. They challenged what art is and ought to be.
The Taco Bell Cheez-It Tostada may be a work of Dadaist art. It is absurd. It is meaningless. It flies in the face of culinary convention. It breaks norms. It is the latest of a line of fast food innovations challenging what food is and ought to be.
But maybe there is more to the Cheez-It Tostada.
In the face of God’s death, of anomie, of the breakdown of normative and moral value, of the the absurdity that surrounds us, we may easily become nihilists. But, Nietzche himself was not a nihilist. He believed in human creativity and the creation of life anew, the conquering of nihilism.
In Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel, Nausea, the protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, experiences existential unease when recognizing the fundamental absurdity of the world. There is no meaning in a chestnut tree. There is no meaning in the Cheez-It Tostada. But this absurdity is the key to existence.
Without inherent meaning in the world, we are free. We are powerful. We may conquer nihilism. We may create meaning from the absurd.
The Cheez-It Tostada is absurd. It is nauseating. But it is also a revelation.
It is our baptism in Baja Blast.
It is the unending potential of humanity reborn.
