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The article presents information on the development of the Taco bell that provides vision of the future transformation of ethnic and national cuisines into corporate fast food in the U.S. It informs that there are problems with this interpretation of Yankee ingenuity transforming a Mexican peasant tradition. It further informs that the history of the Mexican American taco also help to explain the seemingly paradoxical reception of Taco Bell within the ethnic community.

The article discusses public food selling and eating among Mexican communities in San Antonio, Texas, and southern Italian migrants in New York City, focusing on the period of the 1870s through the 1940s. It examines street food and restaurants. The authors comment on Italian eating and drinking establishments called tavernas and Mexican eating and drinking establishments called fondas. They also explore how differences in racialization and municipal governance impacted the public food cultures of these communities.

An introduction to the journal is presented which discusses articles in the issue, including one on milk consumption in Mexico in the twentieth century, one on the replacement of bison with beef on Indian reservations in Montana, and one on teaching food history.

The article presents the text of an online forum of food historians that explored their experiences of teaching food history, held between May and July 2010. It examines the participants' career trajectories and reflects on the practice of asking students to eat food. Other topics considered include the relationship between food history and radical history, the connection between labor and consumer behavior, and identity. Forum participants included historians Amy Bentley, Peter Scholliers, and Daniel Bender.

A response is offered to the article "Setting the Table: Historians, Popular Writers, and Food History," by Matt Garcia in the issue. It discusses U.S. food studies, food scholarship and popular and academic food history writing by food historians.

This article discusses the history of taco. It emphasizes that the taco was itself a product of modernity rather than some folkloric dish transformed by corporate formulators. It describes the reinvention of the taco by migrants in Los Angeles, California. It concludes that the first taco franchises succeeded not by selling fast food per se but rather by marketing a form of exoticism that allowed non-ethnics to sample Mexican cuisine without crossing lines of segregation in California.