shot, we didn’t even get the Big Mac.” One month later, an entire arena of Philadelphia Sixers fans booed their own team when they ran out the clock during a 99–80 win over the Atlanta Hawks instead of trying for the free Big Mac. Perhaps to head off a potential riot, Sixers coach Doug Collins had the public address announcer tell the crowd that Big Macs were on him.
On the other side of the country, a similar chant is well-known. At Los Angeles Lakers games whenever the team wins a game while keeping an opponent beneath 100 points, everyone wins two free Jack in the Box tacos. “The ‘We want tacos!’ chant is as much a part of Lakers home-game traditions as Jack Nicholson sitting courtside,” said Ben Smith, a professional sports gambler and team obsessive. In recent years, Lakers fans have had pretty good luck, scoring two free Jack in the Box tacos nearly two hundred times between 2006 and 2016. Assuming all fans cashed in their tacos, this promo had the potential to ding the company for over 7 million tacos.*
It’s probably reasonable to see conspiracy in these performance-based promotions, which are popular at all levels of sports. “It’s a trick,” said onetime Lakers guard Sasha Vujačić after the team fell short of securing the taco promotion in 2009. “They give everyone spicy tacos and no drink. Maybe it would be better if they included a drink.” But what’s telling and brilliant about these promotions is that they elevate the significance of everyday, dopamine-releasing food—Big Macs, Jack in the Box tacos, Bojangles’ biscuits, A&W burgers, Arby’s curly fries, and Culver’s custards—by attaching them to an even bigger sense of excitement and reward. Everybody wins, twice.
The Lakers giveaway is especially mind-blowing because the Jack in the Box taco might just be the single most divisive foodstuff in the fast-food totality. Indeed, the entire life of a Jack in the Box taco is sacrilege. The corn shells are produced at plants in Kansas and Texas and shipped to stores frozen, prefilled with a cooked “taco meat” mélange of indeterminate makeup.* At Jack in the Box stores, they are unfrozen, topped with lettuce, a haphazard spritz of hot sauce, and then, brace yourself, a slice of American cheese. Next, they are submerged completely in oil and deep-fried whole before being served in a taco-sized bag. The result is a slick-with-grease entity, somehow both wet and crisp, savory and spicy, horrifying, pasty, and irresistible, all with the structural integrity of a bridge in rural New Hampshire.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, one addict likened the Jack in the Box taco to a “wet envelope of cat food.” (That Jack in the Box was once owned by pet-food maker Purina for eighteen years has only added to the wicked mythology of its tacos.) When the tacos aren’t free, they come as a pair for ninety-nine cents and are available twenty-four hours a day in some locations, making them both a harbinger of hangovers and a salve for them as well. But, for all of this, the Jack in the Box tacos are by far the most popular item at America’s sixth-largest burger chain, whose menu already includes about a dozen decadent burgers, all-day breakfast sandwiches, and other profane objects like pork-and-cabbage egg rolls and fried jalapeños stuffed with molten cheese.
Menu popularity may actually be too weak of a metric for these tacos. They are yearned for. Coveted. Mimicked in copycat recipes on dozens of sites across the Web for home cooks. Jack in the Box sells over 550 million tacos every year, which evens out to more than a thousand every minute. This figure is roughly the same as the annual domestic sales of Big Macs; one key difference is that Jack in the Box operates in less than half of the states in the union and has less than one-sixth of the total locations that McDonald’s does in America.
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These stories of obsession emanate down from seemingly unlikely places. Even those who oppose chain restaurants on ideological grounds find themselves making grudging endorsements. Hang around enough vegetarians and you’re almost certain to find one that harbors a fierce bias against fast food and yet remains a sucker for at least one of its offerings, usually McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish. During his tenure as editor in chief of the revered food mag Saveur, James Oseland offered his terms of surrender to the humblest of seafood sandwiches. In spite of referring to McDonald’s