Why I Can’t Eat Burritos Anymore

Like you I’ve enjoyed burritos my entire life. They’re a tasty cheap food that you can get anywhere, even in foreign countries, like Mexico. They’re compact, great on the run, and if kept in foil they’ll stay warm for some time. But I can no longer eat them.

There’s something about the magical combination of flour, meat, bean, lard, cheese, sour cream and guacamole that takes out my digestive system. But it’s not just the combination, it’s the size. The modern burrito is too much food.

Many of you are perfectly happy to consume a whole burrito and idle away the day in a frijole-induced stupor, but not I. It’s a waste of crucial metabolic processes that could be spent thinking, exercising, socializing, working - living your life.

Who can say what the cause is for burrito inflation? I asked Malcolm Gladwell about it. If anyone would know about this phenomenon it would be the man with the Giant Hair. Gladwell whipped off this theory about how burrito size correlated to the global sex trade, and I wasn’t going to buy it except for the fact that he couched it within these delightful anecdotes about Emiliano Zapata and how he used to steal burritos from the rich during the Mexican revolution and how Zapata’s great-great-grand cousin introduced the first mass produced tortilla to the United States. He also spoke at length about the lost art of banana peel puppets but I wasn’t sure how that fit.

I’ve seen people cut them in twain but a half burrito never satisfies me. If you leave the second half for your late afternoon snack, the meat grease becomes congealed and takes on an unpalatable sheen and let’s face it, you’ve spent all afternoon on burrito strategy.

It should be a sixty percent portion, which means what I’ve been doing is buying three burritos at a time and chopping each up to 60% and 40% portions, so that I can mathematically combine the 40% portions correctly for a perfect 2 extra 60% portions. The extra burritos are frozen but this is not really an acceptable way to eat. It could be easier but I’m no expert at burrito segmentation.

There should be an ISO-standard size for burritos. It shouldn’t be that hard. In France they have a universal fixed price for the baguette, and you’d bet any French chef worth his culottes will do what ever he can to make it as small as possible, which has led to the technological development of machines to create universally sized baguettes.

Part of the problem, as always, is Mexico. Since they insist on creating tortillas a mano, there will never be a universal tortilla size, and burrito sizes will vary. I can buy a sixteen-inch-diameter tortilla, which will yield a burrito roughly the size of my sculpted thigh muscles.

The approximate size of a standard burrito should be equivalent to the mortar shell from a rocket-propelled grenade. That would probably cut it down to maybe only a thousand calories (with sour cream and guacamole). This size would also be ideal for all those terrorist countries, because you could actually use the burrito as a stopper for the RPG’s, and prevent terrorists from blowing shit up.

This post dedicated to Cha Cha Cha’s in Portland Oregon. Photo from the Seattle PI.