A trio of angry California burrito eaters claims Chipotle is perpetrating a vast calorie conspiracy on the people who order chorizo. All three say they picked the new meat after seeing it advertised as a 300-calorie option on store menus, and MyNewsLA reports they’ve now filed a class-action lawsuit against the chain alleging anyone who ate one of these burritos was “lulled into a false belief” that they’re “healthier than they really are.”
As almost any sentient being these days knows, even a bare-essentials Chipotle burrito isn’t what you’d call healthy, so one purporting to contain a mere 300 calories should definitely strain credulity. According to Chipotle’s own calorie calculator, the chorizo burrito as it’s pictured on menus (with white rice, black beans, and tomato salsa) should contain 955 calories. To keep it at 300 calories, you’d need to just eat the chorizo by itself. Or order a stand-alone tortilla, whatever sense that would make.
The plaintiffs’ suit isn’t without silly moments — one says it wasn’t until after he’d eaten his burrito and felt “excessively full” that he realized the gargantuan item he’d just consumed probably “couldn’t have been just 300 calories.” The other two claim to have had similar epiphanies only after scarfing theirs down. But the bigger problem for Chipotle may be that its decision to put that number on the chorizo option has misled lots of customers already:
In general, Chipotle’s menu lists an opaque range for burrito calories. This is because there
are 60,000 ingredient combinations; as spokesperson Chris Arnold has said,
“We recognize it’s not ideal, but there’s not really a better way to do
it when you can put it together in so many different ways.” That makes the incredibly unambiguous number they stuck to the chorizo option even stranger.
