Thursday, October 27, 2005

Burrito Bandwidth

I’m a big fan of Chipolte burritos. There’s a Chipoltes a couple blocks from my house, so I go there numerous times a month. Recently, I’ve discovered that the new salad option they have offers a huge advantage – more food. The salad basically contains at least all the ingredients of a burrito, plus a mound of romaine lettuce. Since it’s served in a bowl instead of a tortilla shell, there are no capacity constraints or diminished “burrito bandwidth” as I like to call it, due to the size of the tortilla shell. This means that you are likely to receive even more burrito ingredients along with the lettuce. The obvious disadvantage, however, is no tortilla shell, which provides necessary carbohydrates, and yumminess.

On Tuesday evening I’m standing in line at Chipoltes, and watching my salad being made. As I stared at the heaps of ingredients being piled in my bowl, and lamenting over the tortilla I sacrificed in the name of quantity, I had an epiphany. The bowl contained a lot of ingredients, more than would fit in one burrito. In fact, there was almost enough to fill two burritos. Two is more than one. One is less than two. Chipoltes isn’t the only place that sells tortillas. The wheels were in full spin, and soon my bicycle wheels were spinning my way into Safeway, which is actually on the way home. I made a lone purchase of one 8 pack of burrito size tortilla shells, and once back in my own kitchen, I transformed my chicken burrito salad into two burritos. The burrito bandwidth was hence increased, and a new level of cheapness was obtained.

2 Comments:

Blogger equipoise said...

Since you go to Chipotle so often, I'd like to commission a formal study. Each time you go to Chipotle, randomly select either a burrito or salad, and weigh the contents (excluding the bowl or tortilla). I want to see hard numbers proving that the bowl ingredients are actually 2x the burrito :-)

On a different note, I also suspect that choosing the salad also results in the amount of packaging waste being increased, meaning a new level of burden upon our landfills is attained as a side-affect. That's why I always go for the burrito, foil only, no additional paper wrapping, no tray, bring my own utensils and water bottle. Most enviromentally conscious Chipotle option.

4:57 PM  
Blogger Frick said...

I tried to get them to make my salad in a reusable ziplock bag, but it took forever for them to grasp the concept of what I meant. Eventually I convinced them to do it, but immediatly afterwords, they put the ziplock inside the salad tray, wrapped it in tinfoil, and threw it in a paper bag. Ok, maybe not, I imagine that that's how it would probably go.

11:43 PM  

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