I love burritos. They’re a convenient form, and darned tasty. When I lived in Santa Cruz, a few places had what I’ve recently seen referred to as a “San Francisco Burrito” - a large tortilla filled with fresh beans, rice, veggies and/or meat, topped with your choices of salsas and cheeses, and usually wrapped in foil and served with chips. Simple and elegant, and as healthy (or not) as you wanted it.

Leaving Santa Cruz, however, I was presented with the “Good Mexican Food” problem - namely, the more authentic and “good” a Mexican food place was in Orange County, the less likely it would feature vegetarian choices - rice often cooked in chicken stock, beans and tortillas made with lard, and either language and cultural barriers that made it difficult to impossible to know for sure what was actually being served. The large vegetarian population in the greater Bay Area made it easy to find Vegetarian offerings at taquerias - but less vegetarian density made the task much more difficult this side of Bakersfield. What’s a vegetarian to do?

Enter Chipotle.

For a fast food location that grew with McDonald’s as a major investor (though they’ve since sold their stake), Chipotle offers an amazing amount of both good food and good information about their food. Their website lists every ingredient on their assembly line, and marks it as vegetarian, or not. Fine - lots of restaurants do that. But Chipotle goes the extra step and mentions that their cheese is made with vegetable-based rennet, their sour cream is Recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) free, and that one of their bean selection has bacon while the other does not. A step above, and appreciated in a way by people like me that non-meat eaters rarely get.

All that said, Chipotle also serves meat, and it’s meat the liberal, environmental, “care about taste” hippies among us can appreciate too. Their pork is veggie fed outside of factory farm conditions (as is 60 percent of their chicken and more than 40 percent of their beef), and is antibiotic free. I’ve been told you can taste the difference.

I don’t expect every fast food restaurant to go to the lengths Chipotle does - it does cost a bit more money, and requires more training and time for employees. But they might want to look at the long lines, the happy crowds, and reviews like this that are all over the web (have you ever seen anyone write about Taco Bell like this?) - the other restaurants might want to reconsider what they’re offering.

Posted in: Liberal • Rants • Reviews • Vegetarian |

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