Shame

Douglas Adams once wrote, about British food:

It is by eating sandwiches in pubs at Saturday lunchtime that the British seek to atone for whatever their national sins have been. They’re not altogether clear what those sins are, and don’t want to know either. Sins are not the sort of things one wants to know about. But whatever sins there are are amply atoned for by the sandwiches they make themselves eat. 

If there’s anything worse than the sandwiches, it is the sausages which sit next to them. Joyless tubes, full of gristle, floating in a sea of something hot and sad, stuck with a plastic pin in the shape of a chef’s hat: a memorial, one feels, for some chef who hated the world, and died, forgotten and alone among his cats on a back stair in Stepney. 

The sausages are for the ones who know what their sins are and wish to atone for something specific.

So... how bad does your menu have to be that even a Brit sneers at it:

Taco Bell has something of a cult following among the young and inebriated. When “marketing strategist” Laura Ries said that a Doritos taco wouldn’t turn Taco Bell into “a more authentic Mexican restaurant”, Joseph Alexiou responded, quite rightly, that she “clearly has no clue about what attracts people to Taco Bell”. After tasting one of these abominations yesterday, I can attest that it is a truly nasty thing: an unidentifiably oleaginous brown gloop acting as glue between two sides of a radioactive-orange shell which tastes like someone dropped a pound of salt into a vat of Irn-Bru and then solidified the result.

Note, I have nothing against Taco Bell.  I would wonder at the sanity of anyone who thinks it is anything even approaching authentic Mexican food, though.  I also find myself wondering what sins a regular crunchy taco would cover, and which ones you'd need a double decker deluxe to expurgate...