18 Photograph by Stephanie Gonot
As with any good legend, the origins of
Cheetos Crunchy Flamin’ Hots are con-
tested. For years their invention was cred-
ited to Richard Montañez, who worked as
a machine operator at a Frito- Lay plant in
Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., in the 1980s.
According to Montañez, one day after
work he took plain Cheetos home, where
he and his wife experimented with diff er-
ent fl avors. The resulting snack led to his
promotion to an executive position. How-
ever, last year, The Los Angeles Times
broke the news that Montañez’s story was
inaccurate: He might have pitched sim-
ilar products during his time there, but
Flamin’ Hot Cheetos was not one of them.
To me, though, Montañez’s story speaks
to a diff erent kind of truth about Flamin’
Hots. I associate them with the particular
experience of being a kid who stayed after
school while growing up in Los Angeles.
When I was in middle school in the early
2000s, those of us who stayed were mostly
kids of color with a working single parent
and no siblings, kids who otherwise would
be home alone. Every day after 3 p.m., myCheetos Crunchy Flamin’ Hots
By Summer Kim Lee
friends and I went off school grounds to a
convenience store across the street, next
to a Mexican restaurant, to buy Flamin’
Hots, which had been removed from
school vending machines in the principal’s
campaign against ‘‘junk food.’’
By the time I started elementary school,
my parents had divorced and moved from
El Segundo. My dad went to the San Fer-
nando Valley, while my mom and I moved
to the aff luent West side neighborhood of
Westwood, where she had a fund- raising
job at U.C.L.A. This became a deciding2.13.Something as perfect
as Flamin’ Hots
could only come out
of unauthorized
innovation:
a challenge to
acceptable
taste that embraces
artificial excess.Letter of Recommendation