It wasn't exactly the Treaty of Versailles, but let's just say that peace reigns throughout Taco Land once again. For now.
Today's heartwarming news comes from The Texas Tribune, which reported that the mayors of Austin and San Antonio came together Thursday morning to douse "The Great Breakfast War of 2016" with the salsa of brotherly-city love.
"As St. Paul admonishes us, let us not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with breakfast tacos," Austin Mayor Steve Adler said. "We will have guac in our times."
The signing of the so-called "I-35 Accords" and the proclamation of March 10, 2016 as "Breakfast Taco Day" would seem to quash the taco tumult sparked by an Feb. 19 article in Eater Austin, a subsidiary of Vox Media, that characterized Austin as the breakfast taco's birthplace.
Adler stood alongside San Antonio Mayor Ivy Taylor at Austin's downtown Hilton, the Tribune observed, as chummy as chorizo con huevos.
"What we must do and what we will do is lead," Adler said. "And that means celebrating the fact that there is more that unites our tacos than divides them. Let us break our fast with the tortilla of hope and the egg of peace."
The article in question, "How Austin Became the Home of the Crucial Breakfast Taco," prompted a social-media meltdown, in which detractors - including Gustavo Arellano, the Orange County-based author of the book Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America - shredded the story like so much lettuce for belittling its south Texas roots, particularly in San Antonio.
"There is more than unites our tacos than divides them. Let us break our fast with the tortilla of hope and the egg of peace."-- Austin Mayor Steve Adler
No simple tempest in a tortilla, this. Instead, it embodied the culture clash between Latino-rich south Texas and a city of largely white hipsters often accused of, as our own Charles Scudder wrote, "blind appropriation." A petition on Change.org calling for the article's author to be thrown out of the state roared to life with thousands of nearly immediate supporters. Newspapers fired off editorial broadsides. Chefs challenged each other to breakfast-taco throwdowns.
But with Thursday's culinary ceasefire, all that came to an end. The mayors brought each other tacos. Adler said it was necessary to clear the air before President Obama's Austin visit on Friday, since "presidents don't enter war zones."
[UPDATE March 11: President Obama, perhaps understanding the seriousness of this taco debacle, ate tacos for lunch in Austin before his SXSW speech.]
"Some of you may look upon these breakfast tacos and feel only hunger," Adler said, noting the pair's peace-making selection of bacon and egg and carne guisada tacos. "I pity those people, for when I look at these breakfast tacos, I feel hope and a renewed friendship between our cities."
