There is something quietly devastating about the arrival of Zaxby’s new Giant Quesadillas. They are marketed as loud and celebratory, an overstuffed ode to "BIG" Americana: crispy Chicken Fingerz, molten cheddar, and the sanctified smear of ranch. But beyond the fanfare, beneath the corporate shout of "bigger is better," lurks the soft ache of a culture that confuses abundance with satisfaction and indulgence with intimacy.
The press release insists on stacked bravado. "Ultimate indulgence," "GIANT portion," "craveable twist." Each phrase is capitalized as if it is pleading to matter. Yet in the LED-lit, vintage-style hush of the dining room, somewhere between the first euphoric bite and the inevitable collapse of structural integrity (which raises the question: why has Zaxby’s not engineered a better quesadilla envelope?), this bombast gives way to something quieter and more familiar. The cheese pull of regret, a sliver of onion sticking out like a memory you did not know still hurt.
It is not just about Zaxby’s New Giant Quesadillas. It is about how we eat when we feel unseen.
There is a specific emotional resonance to these limited-time offerings, released just as the pollen count spikes and half the country collectively wheezes into their antihistamines. Allergies feel like the body grieving in slow motion. You are tired but cannot sleep, hungry but detached from taste. In this state, the Zaxby’s Chicken Fajita Giant Quesadilla, packed with three hand-breaded Chicken Fingers, Cheddar Jack cheese, grilled onions and peppers, and Southwest Ranch on a flour tortilla, is not food. It is balm. It is warmth. A handheld hallucination of being cared for. And then you remember: you are alone. You were always alone. The ranch is cold.
This release coincides cruelly with that yearly emotional thaw, the season when people emerge, evolve, and succeed without you. They get married, write novels, and taper off SSRIs. Meanwhile, you are bedrotting with The Cure’s Disintegration on loop, the lyrics wrapping around your scrolling thumb like gauze. "I never said I would stay to the end." Robert Smith understands what a quesadilla cannot. Permanence is a myth, and excess is often a mask for abandonment.
The quesadillas themselves echo this sentiment. Overloaded to the point of dysfunction, they cannot hold themselves together. Neither can you. Each bite becomes a negotiation. Desire versus dignity. Heat versus hand coordination. The act of eating them alone in your car, ranch pooling on your jeans, is strangely theatrical. Like a failed Beckett character waiting for a drip that never lands where you want it.
There is also the galling reality that the people we imagine watching us are not watching at all. The one who left does not care that you are posting stories of faux-joyful solo bites, captioned "better off," like a lie you have told enough times to believe. The performative resilience of public consumption, the idea that overindulgence signals healing, falls flat without an audience. And social media, always the mirrorball of discontent, reflects only the curated joys of others. You scroll, chew, swallow. Then repeat.
In Ways of Seeing, John Berger wrote, "We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves." The Zaxby’s Giant Quesadilla is not just a sandwich. It is a relationship barometer. A crisis object. A diary entry wrapped in foil.
If this is food as art, and perhaps it is, it belongs in the lineage of modern melancholia, alongside Tracey Emin’s unmade bed or Sophie Calle’s forensic heartbreaks. The quesadilla, in its failed architecture and desperate grandeur, performs the absurdity of trying to fill a void that is not physical. And like those works, it does not resolve. It simply lingers, unsure of its own purpose.
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