Pat Eats Garbage Food: Jack in the Box Loaded Tiny Tacos, one of the finest dirtbag delicacies | Explore Yakima

I love newspaper food pages, what with their Bolognese sauce recipes and reviews of locavore bistros. They tell us how to eat well, and that’s something of real value. Putting thought into what we put in our bodies is never a bad thing.

That said, sometimes I just wanna grab some garbage food and shove greedy handfuls of it into my dumb face. There’s not much coverage of junk food in the food pages, and this feature seeks to remedy that.

In every biweekly edition of Pat Eats Garbage Food, I’ll review a different fast food item or convenience store snack and let you know what works and what doesn’t. (You’ll note I didn’t say what’s good and what’s bad; it’s all bad. That’s the point.)

The food

In this very special episode of Pat Eats Garbage Food, we present one of the finest dirtbag delicacies in the entire grease-soaked world of fast food: Jack in the Box Loaded Tiny Tacos. This pile of hastily arranged fat and carbohydrates is so over-the-top repulsive as to make the regular Jack in the Box tacos appear reasonable. Here at the Yakima Herald-Republic Garbage Food desk, we frequently deride and-or celebrate the depraved food-development minds at Taco Bell. (“People like Fritos, right? Could we, like, just add them to other foods?”) But we rarely take the time to acknowledge the next-most-psychotic geniuses in the fast-food world, the research and development department at Jack in the Box.

These guys long ago leaned into their status as purveyors of trash for late-night drunks and stoners. And the results have been as irresistible as they have been disgusting. The Loaded Tiny Tacos are merely a case in point.

The damage

$6.49 for 15 tiny tacos covered in goopy fixins. You can get extra cheese sauce for $1.25. You can get extra shredded lettuce for free. I have no way of knowing this for sure, but I feel confident in saying nobody ever orders the extra lettuce.

The other damage

680 calories (330 from fat), 36 grams fat, 8 grams saturated fat, 75 mg cholesterol, 1,330 mg sodium, 21 grams protein, 5 grams sugar. That’s without extra lettuce.

Official description

From www.jackinthebox.com (please read the following in a movie trailer voice): “In a world … where tacos have always been the same size, one food will change the course of history — Loaded Tiny Tacos! Experience the biggest blockbuster of the year, 15 Tiny Tacos loaded up with cheese sauce, shredded lettuce and our very own taco sauce.” (End movie trailer voice if you want.) That description, while sufficiently hyperbolic and hipster-cliched, is not as crazy as I’d hoped it would be. I guess they exhausted all of their mad-science artistry on developing the food itself.

My description

They’re loaded with lettuce, nacho cheese, taco sauce and an abiding sense of shame. (Extra shame, unlike extra cheese, is entirely free of charge.) When I order these — and, friends, I’ve ordered them several times now — I always sigh deeply before opening them up. It’s not a happy sigh; it’s a defeated sigh. It’s an “aw dammit, I guess we’re doing this again” kind of sigh.

How do they feel?

They feel bad. Not just physically but emotionally and psychologically. They also feel bad in a tactile sense. Like slimy. I suppose I could use a fork, but if I were in a state of mind to care that much about anything, I wouldn’t be there with a carton of Loaded Tiny Tacos in front of me in the first place.

Will I eat them again?

(World’s longest sigh) Yes.

Overall rating

5 out of 10. I wish I either liked these enough to like them or hated them enough to not eat them.

Pat Muir is former Yakima Herald-Republic staff writer whose Pat Eats Garbage Food Column ran from 2018 to 2020. It appears in Explore every two weeks.