How to Cope If You’re Too Skeeved Out to Eat Chipotle

Update 2/8/2016: All US Chipotle locations will close for 4 hours today for mandatory food safety meetings. The advice below will help us all get through this. Together. 

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So you’ve heard the heart-wrenching news about Chipotle closing 43 stores in the Pacific Northwest to deal with a nasty outbreak of E. coli, and perhaps you’ve made the agonizing decision to hold off on your weekly (daily? anyone?) slice of burrito heaven until they’ve got this pesky bacterial infection safely squared away.

But what do you do in the meantime to get through life? 

1. Go to the grocery store

Find the avocados. Pick up as many as you can bundle into your arms. Really, try to pick up like eight of them and cradle them like they’re your babies. Walk around the store and whisper softly to them about how someday they’ll meet some nice limes and then life will only get more exciting from that point on.

2. Enter the nearest Taco Bell and act like a normal customer

When you get to the counter and the inevitably bored cashier asks if you’d like to try a Gordita Doritos Burrtaco with Extra Meaty Meat for $1.99 or whatever, slap them across the face, scream “YOU’LL NEVER REPLACE CHIPOTLE IN MY HEART!” and then run away very fast before the cops get there.

3. Accept an invitation to a fancy dinner party

When your hostess inquires about your food preferences based on a menu she's had printed on cardstock thicker than a Chipotle burrito bowl container, reply only by choosing from the following words or phrases:

• White
• Brown
• Steak
• Chicken
• Carnitas [You may NEVER say pork.]
• Some of that tofu shit
• Mild
• Medium
• Hot
• More cheese
• Yes, I know that guac is extra.

4. Google “how to make Chipotle at home”

You will come across many blog posts by foodies who begin by explaining that they just don’t GET the Chipotle fervor, especially when you can make your own version of a burrito bowl at home and it’s MUCH better and MUCH cheaper. Pick the least annoying of these. Carefully read through the directions.

• Order every ingredient delivered straight to your door via Amazon Prime or InstaCart or the bougie delivery service of your choice.
• Arrange everything on your counter in the order in which it will be used.
• Prep your knives and your pans.
• Move your trash can to the edge of the counter and then sweep the entire lot of it--KNIVES INCLUDED--into the trash, because nothing you could ever make in your shitty little kitchen could ever be better than Chipotle.

5. Start a Change.org petition

About what, I’m not entirely sure. But listen, if a guy can start a Change.org petition to get rehired as an ice skating Santa Claus, I think the bar has already been lowered far enough for you to hijack their platform for burrito-related problems.

6. Book an emergency session with your therapist

Start out by telling her that you’d like to take this opportunity to examine your own ingrained perceptions about the state of our mass-market food culture; the myth of the socially responsible mega-chain; the American dependence on cheap meat and the resulting disastrous effect on global resources and climate change; the dangerous unsubstantiated fear-induced backlash against GMOs; not to mention your personal relationship with food and your tendency to pile on the cheese and sour cream as a direct rebuke of your mother’s scientifically dubious and body-shaming mantra that “fat makes you fat.”

The moment your therapist’s face begins to register her surprise at your intellectual maturity, burst into laughter, then segue into ugly tears, and say, “But seriously, if I don’t get a Chipotle burrito soon I’m afraid of what I might do to myself and others.”

7. Don’t overthink it

Wait until it’s raining. Walk to your nearest Chipotle. Stand outside crying.

Megan Bungeroth is a writer and editor in Chicago. Follow her @meganbungeroth.