After some failed errand-running that involved a hockey girdle, the state of California, and a monkey company (don’t ask), I ended up at a Mexican place for lunch. More specifically, a Qdoba.
And I think they tried to kill me.
Now, let me get a couple things out in the open here. First: Obviously, whatever homicide the fine people at Qdoba had planned for me was less of the stabbity-stab variety and more of the long, slow coronary type.
Second: It’s not exactly like I’m the healthiest person on the face of the earth. I mean, I’m not willfully unhealthy. I feel like that distinction matters. I’m not out there having a two-liter of Mountain Dew and a whole chocolate cake for breakfast, you know? And if sometimes I slip up and make some inadvertently unhealthy choices, there’s no shame in that. Really, who among us hasn’t accidentally eaten an entire tube of Pringles in one sitting at some time or other? It’s not like I’m training for the Olympics.
Third: I’m singling them out, but it’s not like Qdoba is alone in the fattening of America. We’re all in this together. And, frankly, it’s getting kind of crowded and sweaty in here, you guys.
So what’s my beef with Qdoba, you ask? Well, though I appreciate your poorly attempted culinary pun, I should point out that it wasn’t beef but chicken that was proffered as the instrument of my (slow) demise. A chicken burrito, as it were. Except that to call the monstrosity that was served to me a chicken burrito would be akin to calling a rampaging lion a little kitty.
It’s not the number of ingredients, it’s the volume. It’s the bulk. So much food was piled onto the innocent tortilla that it could no longer bear the burden. I watched, in horror, as the Qdoba employee almost literally wrestled with her wretched creation in order to fold it into what could charitably be called burrito-shape. As she shifted on her feet in order to use the weight of her body to pull the burrito’s wrapping tight, the tortilla – already struggling to contain its immense contents – split. Guacamole burst forth in a display that was distinctly Hulk-ian.
In the end she handed me a vaguely football-shaped foil-covered mass that easily weighed two pounds. The American inside of me wanted to be happy about the value – two pounds of food for seven dollars! But the thought of eating this dumbbell sized burrito was horrible. It seemed so huge and massive and yet I was expected to put it – the whole, two pound thing – in my body!
Perhaps most disturbing of all was that, despite all that I’ve just said, a small part of my brain wanted to eat the whole thing. “So much food for so little; it’s such a bargain!” it said to me. “I can’t let it go to waste! It’s not like I eat like this everyday!”
This is why America is fat, everyone. These thoughts and these servings. Why do we think this way? Why can’t we stop ourselves? And maybe most importantly, why did a fast-food Mexican restaurant want to give me the experience of being seven months pregnant with a burrito baby?
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