While I am one who is all in for living life to the best of your ability and never settling for anything less than what you can absolutely afford, the fact remains that there are some trade off’s which are just not worth it. Take, as an example, Chipotle Mexican food versus Taco Bell. While neither one is particularly the best choice for you in terms of health, the fact remains that both are options for your dining dollar when you’re on the go. They both deal in similar cuisine (fast food Mexican) and they are both available widely. Chipotle is newer so they don’t have nearly the penetration that The Bell does (I remember when they introduced Taco Bell into the school cafeteria! How happy was I?). Still, both companies are widely known; particularly in more populated, urban-metro areas.
A quick glance over the nutritional charts on Chipotle reveals some not all that starting facts; there are a lot of calories, a lot of fat and saturated fat, and not a whole lot of nutritional value in the Chipotle products. If you want to see for yourself, the chart is HERE. Chipotle lists everything separate and they make it a challenge to add up all this stuff because it’s a PDF. However if you shrink the PDF down a little bit you can see everything on one screen and add up all the calories in your Chipotle product. The burrito I usually get has a straight 1000 calories! And I go to Chipotle for lunch!
Then I looked at what I used to get at the nutrition for Taco Bell. Even what felt extreme when I got them; the two Taco Supremes; is still less than half of the calories from one burrito from Chipotle. Now that Taco Bell has that “Fresco Menu” the calories could even potentially be less, depending on what you order! Taco Bell is the healthy alternative? I knew this day would come.
The real reason I even happened on this article was because of the money. The Chipotle food is good but I never feel good about spending twenty bucks (or thereabouts) for lunch with me and my wife. I stumbled on the nutrition stuff by accident. While quality, of course, is no real contest, the fact remains that the Taco Bell stuff does score higher across all other avenues. And really, it’s just food anyway. Shouldn’t we eat frugally and conserve while we’re eating lunch out alone so that we can go out somewhere nice and treat our sweetheart at the end of the week?
The discussion of Taco Bell versus Chipotle seems to be a dead issue. If the food from Chipotle weren’t so darn tasty, the matter would be fully put to rest. Maybe, instead of the fancy, gluttonous Italian joint for your romantic dinner, you can take your sweetheart out to dinner at Chipotle! Now that’s romance!
Sources:
http://www.chipotle.com/ChipotleNutrition.pdf
http://www.tacobell.com/nutrition/calculator/
