One of the fun little perks you get of being subscribed to us on Patreon is that you get free blog articles weeks in advance! Unfortunately, we blogged a lot last year due to not really having anything else to do, which means we’ve built up a sizable backlog of small articles that aren’t really worth wasting a whole calendar day to publish separately.
This marks the start of our roundup series, where we publicly premiere some of our articles that you may have missed. Please note: if you have not pledged to us on Patreon, these are new articles! Not just a bunch of rehashed content.
Taco Bell – Grilled Cheese Burrito
The Grilled Cheese Burrito, or the ‘GCB’ as it is known to us Bell-heads (uhh, what do you call members of the Taco Bell fandom?), was a bittersweet liminal byproduct of the end of an era. Fried in an outer layer of gooey cheese and filled with your Taco Bell standard ingredients, the GCB was somehow simultaneously transformative and conservative – hey, maybe horseshoe theory really is true!
The GCB was also a technical disaster. For a long period of its lifespan it was only available on the Taco Bell app, and if you placed any mobile orders during the peak of quarantine, you’ll know intimately that Taco Bell found a way to install a medieval torture voice directly onto your phone.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the GCB also became their main specialty offering after they gutted the menu. We quickly began to resent it, as it was basically the only thing worth ordering. The GCB became a symbol to us of everything wrong with the fast food world during 2020: sure it was fucking amazing, but it wasn’t innovative or interesting, it was just the same damn ingredients rotated in a new way.
Anyway, potatoes are finally back at Taco Bell. Nature is healing, we are the virus 💛
Cheetos Mac ‘n Cheese
Oh good God.
Hey, can you believe we actually ate this? Because I can’t. Just look at it! It doesn’t look edible in the least. It looks like fluorescent red toy food. It’s angry. Does anyone else hear battle music playing? Because this shit looks like a miniboss on 1/3rd of its health.
And it … was fine. Really. It tastes exactly what you think it would taste like, and maybe even a little better if you’re a real spicy Cheetos freak like Will.
Somehow this wasn’t the only time 2020 tested our patience with macaroni and cheese, because there was also the Kraft Breakfast, but that was literally rebranded Kraft Dinner and far less memorable. The Cheetos Mac & Cheese is still around in stores to this day, and it continues to taunt us. Have you seen TikTok star Lisa Nguyen put it in a quesadilla? You’re welcome. It’s terrifying.
Popeyes – Twisty Wicked Shrimp
Popeyes used to come up with some real slam dunk limited-time offers, back in like, 2015. Or maybe we just think that because that’s when we started blogging and everything seemed super novel to us back then. Shrugs!
Popeyes’ Twisty Wicked Shrimp was hardly wicked at all, but it certainly was shrimp, and it was a refreshing callback to their oh-so cheap combo boxes. Seriously, remember when you could get chicken and two sides for $4? Those were the days of cheap chicken and bad eating habits. We miss you, lower-rate-of-inflation. We miss you so much.
Popeyes does some of the best seafood in the fast food game. You can’t get shrimp at McDonalds, can you? No, you can’t. And that alone made the Twisty Wicked Shrimp something totally worth it.
Dunkin’ Donuts – Spicy Ghost Pepper Donut
Ghost pepper should mean ghost pepper, something spicy with an intensity that only the most dedicated pepperheads can tolerate. This was not ghost pepper spicy. In fact, it wasn’t even spicy at all. It was basically a crappy yeast doughnut with strawberry sprinkles on top. It was gross, it was stale, and it was just plain bad.
They lied to us. After everything we had been through, we were ready to eat something that made us feel a fraction of the suffering that we were feeling emotionally, and we didn’t even get that.
This was our greatest disappointment of 2020, and this is coming from people who caught COVID-19.
