Thursday, July 7, 2011

Chipotle's soda cups enjoy ambiguous language.


Chipotle Restaurant is best known for burritos and their ability to turn your breath into the greatest anti-social crutch possible. (Baby, this garlic breath shouldn't go to waste...)

Their soda cups are best known for little paragraphs that praise burritos and/or Chipotle. It's cute corporate brainwashing in paragraph form.

What's curious is the way Chipotle phrases things. Let's look. Their sentences in italics/pretty colors:

They say a restaurant could never use mostly naturally raised meat because it's waaaay too expensive & hard to find.

Okay, I give up. What's "naturally raised meat"? Is this meat raised with good family values? How does cattle become "naturally raised"? I assume this means it was nurtured by a loving mom and dad, read bedtime stories, and received a quality education. Before it ended up in my burrito all tasty and delicious.

And what is this "mostly"? Legally, is mostly just 51%? Maybe 50.1%? This sounds disheartening, as if the meat comes from a broken home--that its mom and dad loved it 51% of the time, but, gumdangit, that other 49% of the time mom and dad really didn't love their meat child. This possibly explains why it ended up in my burrito.

They say it's impossible to change the way people farm to make sure that the earth is generally taken care of.

Chipotle loves their adverbs. Now it's "generally." You usually only hear such open-ended words used by politicians and mob bosses. What is "generally taken care of"? Generally taking care of the Earth could mean only polluting it 49% of the time. That BP oil slick? Totally the 49%. Smokey the Bear? Easily the other 51%.

Well, I'll say this: I generally like Chipotle's burritos. Mostly. Ambiguous brainwashing attempts aside.



Note: That's an actual photo found through Google of a Chipotle burrito. For better or--likely--worse.



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