An ode to yum brands

Some days here at Middlebury just seem too perfect. The autumn air is crisp, but not too cool, professors cancel class and homework assignments and maybe you even sneak a glimpse of your Proctor crush giving you the once-over from across the salad bar. Yet every golden sunset at the end of every sublime day is slightly tempered by an underlying current of imperfection; a blemish on the collective face of Middlebury College, the knowledge of which is sometimes too much to bear. What could this malevolent force be, this invisible beast that haunts our very beings as residents of the greater Middlebury area? Of course I’m referring to that great blight we all deal with every day — the conspicuous lack of a combination Taco Bell/KFC in the otherwise wonderful town of Middlebury.
There. I said it. And now that it’s out there, we should probably do something about it. Let us examine our current dining options on say, a Sunday evening after 8 p.m. The dining halls are closed. Restaurants in town are closed.  The Grille or MiddXpress, you might ask? Darker than the bags under a microbiology-biochemistry major’s eyes in finals week (a fact which the money-laden SGA still has inexplicably yet to address despite almost universal outcry).  And don’t even get me started on the Almighty Town of Middlebury’s ridiculous zoning-related decree to our beloved McDonalds, ensuring that our Big Mac cravings will go insatiated until an undisclosed date in October.
Who among us hasn’t felt those sudden pangs of hunger after a late-night library session, wanting only a small morsel of perhaps a KFC double down sandwich, or a single item off the value menu from the always-delicious Taco Bell?  Now consider the same question, but instead of 8 on a Sunday, imagine it’s 3 in the morning on a Saturday night. Are you seriously telling me you wouldn’t give an arm and a leg for just one chicken quesadilla, or a 12-piece bucket of extra crispy chicken for the low, low price of $5.99?
Let me be blunt ­— I love Taco Bell. It was my immediate post-school stop every day once I got my car in high school (much to the chagrin of both my girlfriend and cardiologist). I once racked up a $65 tab at a Taco Bell drive-thru in Sherwood, Arkansas at 4 in the morning. It is consistently the cheapest, most accessible and most delicious fast food on the face of the earth. You know what’s a close second? Freakin’ KFC.
It is a certainty beyond any reasonable doubt that when Tricon Global Resteraunts broke off as a subsidiary of PepsiCo. in 1997 the world of fast food changed forever, because it brought about the single most important dining innovation since the Earl of Sandwich slapped some meat between some bread back in the day:  the combination Taco Bell/KFC.  No longer were Americans forced to decide between original recipe with a golden buttermilk biscuit on the side and a beef grilled stuffed burrito with extra cheese. In my hometown of Little Rock, Ark. there are no fewer than five of these magnificent establishments. This leads us to my main point — if my humble hometown can have more Taco Bell/KFCs than Newt Gingrich has mistresses, why can we not have one in Middlebury? This is, after all, a college town. It makes perfect sense, and would be the greatest economic benefit for the town since someone stuck a waterwheel in Otter Creek. Is the Middlebury town council so attached to its pretentious ideas of “authenticity” that it can’t let us have just one damn piece of civilization in our otherwise remote bastion of faux liberal ideas of what is right and wrong with small-town America? Well in the famous words of Howard Beale from the classic movie Network, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.”
So let’s stand up, Middlebury. Write letters to Yum Brands.  Write letters to the town council.  Write letters to Ron Liebowitz. Hell, write letters to SGA president Riley O’Rourke ’12. He’s gotta have some power, right?  At any rate, let us now resolve to never again have an otherwise perfect Middlebury day be ruined by our crippling inability to eat a damn taco.