Maybe you haven’t heard, but buying your tacos from a taco truck in San Francisco’s Mission district is as bad as buying it from Taco Bell.  Or worse!

This is what I learned reading Your Taco, Deconstructed at a site called Good.is.   The article says that a landscape designer at an art school had his students pick apart a taco from a taco truck and try to figure out where it all came from.  Turns out that taco truck owner Juan gets his supplies at a few food service joints, and they in turn get it from mass producers.  One example given is that Juan’s avacados come from Chile, which the article notes is the world’s largest producer of avacados. 

This makes sense given the economic law of comparative advantage, since Chile produces avacados more effciently we benefit from buying from them.  According to the article,  a “moral taco” would be ineffciently produced by using higher cost (and in some cases lower quality) materials which would be produced in an area near where the taco was assembled or consumed.  Which would result in a higher cost, lower quality taco.