(It starts with burrito-savoring, but immediately spreads to flagrantly carnal acts described in plain terms, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
An old ad campaign for Taco Bell’s beefy burritos, drastically pornphotoshopped so as to illustrate techniques for tackling those tasty tortilla tubes (10/12 hat tip to Chris Hansen):
(#1) Eat my burrito, dude!
Is this queer, or what? One shirtless guy takes tube lying on his side on a bed, the other eats it on his knees. Both have a hand wrapped firmly around the base of the object of their desire. Both have their eyes closed in the ecstasy of oral pleasure.
What do we call this act of sensual gratification? I’m going for burritio /bǝríšiò/: New Latin for ‘burrito-eating’, on loose analogy with fellatio /fǝléšiò/ ‘cock-sucking’, encouraged by the physical similarities between the two objects and between the two acts.
Background 1. Your default burrito is a filled flour tortilla formed into a tube. The filling is beans (whole or as frijoles refritos), usually beef (ground, shredded, or in small chunks) as well — though other meats and seafood are alternatives — plus accompaniments and seasonings (Mexican rice, lettuce, tomatoes, cheese, guacamole, sour cream, and so on). The filled tortilla is then usually grilled or steamed, and the burrito is eaten by hand.
(#2) Wrapped burritos; burritos are often served with one or both ends of the tube open
The number of local variants, inventive elaborations, and fusions with other types of food is stupendous.
A few burrito postings on this blog:
— on 8/9/16 in “Advances in the fast food world”, a section on burritos
— on 4/28/18 in “Another portmanrito”, on portmanteau names for burritos, with links to earlier postings on the topic
— on 5/10/18 in “Another fusirrito”, on fusion burritos, with or without portmanteau names: the Whopperrito (a Burger King fusirrito), the Sushirrito (a Japanese fusirrito), the turkerito (a Thanksgiving fusirrito), the Protein Bar-rito (an organic / natural fusirrito), and the tikka masala burrito (a desi fusirrito)
Background 2. The actual Taco Bell ads for beefy burritos show only the burritos, not their consumers:
(#3)
(#4)
The mash-ups in #1 superimpose (a) the text and logo material from these actual ads and (b) images of Taco Bell burritos on (c) backgrounds from gay porn that show intensely engaged fellators rather than burritors (I haven’t identified the specific sources).
In fact, it seems that Taco Bell’s print ads almost never show anyone consuming the company’s products; people eat stuff in the Taco Bell tv commercials, but not in their print ads.
Main event 1. The phallicity of burritos would be hard to miss. It’s tubular food, and on roughly human scale to boot. Through its association with beef, and the conventional view of beef as Real Man’s Meat, it picks up an extra dose of masculinity. And of course Spanish burrito is masculine gender.
Main event 2, about literal burritio, the eating of burritos. Though easily portable and encased in a protective tortilla shell, burritos (especially the larger ones) can be messy to eat, so they are sometimes sold with an extra wrapping, of aluminum foil, as here:
(#5) Del Taco’s Epic Carne Asada Burrito: “Loaded with freshly grilled carne asada, slow-cooked beans made from scratch, cilantro lime rice, tangy guacamole, and handmade pico de gallo salsa, wrapped in a warm, oversized flour tortilla” (from Del Taco’s page on their burrito offerings)
(On the noun carne asada, from NOAD: (in Mexican cooking) beef that has been marinated and grilled, typically served sliced in thin strips as a main course or as a filling in tacos, burritos, etc. … ORIGIN Spanish, ‘grilled meat’.)
There’s even an instruction manual, of sorts, for dealing with things like #5. From the wikiHow entry “How to Eat a Burrito” of 5/7/19:
Burritos are served at fast-food joints, taco stands, and fancy Mexican restaurants. You can even make them yourself. But one thing about eating a burrito is that it can be a cumbersome endeavor. The tortilla can come apart or unfold, causing the filling to leak out and leave you with quite the mess. Learning to eat a burrito in the proper way will let you focus on enjoying the flavor and not so much on keeping the burrito from falling apart.
1 Don’t unwrap the whole burrito. The foil is going to be your key to keeping the burrito from falling apart while you eat it. The tortilla alone may not be wrapped tightly enough to hold all the ingredients in.
2 Stand the burrito upright. While it is still wrapped in the foil, stand the burrito up on one end so that it is perpendicular to the table. A well-wrapped burrito should be able to stand up on its own, but this is not necessary for your enjoyment.
3 Peel the foil down about an inch or two. Open the foil at the top end. Peel around the burrito like you are unwrapping a roll of lifesavers candy, but do not completely unwrap it…
4 Use two hands. Grab your burrito with both hands to keep it stable. If you’re not in a fancy restaurant, you can keep the burrito on the table and lean in to bite it in the early stages. Eventually you’ll have to lift it to your mouth…
5 Take a bite from one of the corners. Most burritos are too big for you to be able to fit its entire girth in your mouth without choking. Your best bet is to start off at one of the corners. — Biting the burrito in the middle will just cause the contents to spill out.
6 Work your way across. Take even bites working to keep the top of the burrito level.
… 8 Peel back more of the foil. As you make your way further down the burrito, being sure to keep the bites even, tear off about an inch more of the foil…
Coping with burritos would be much less of a challenge if gigantism / sizism hadn’t become so much the rage, in burritio as (for so long now) in fellatio. Especially here in the Bay Area, home of the Mission Burrito. From Wikipedia:
A Mission burrito (also known as a San Francisco burrito or a Mission-style burrito) is a type of burrito that first became popular during the 1960s in the Mission District of San Francisco, California. It is distinguished from other burritos by its large size and inclusion of extra rice and other ingredients. A key method to the burritos’ construction is to steam the wheat flour tortilla to increase its flexibility prior to adding the other ingredients, although that is not a requirement and burritos may be grilled instead. It has been referred to as one of three major styles of burritos in the United States, following the earlier, simple burrito consisting of beans, rice, and meat. It precedes the California burrito, which developed in the 1980s and contains cheese and potatoes.
Many taquerías in the Mission and greater San Francisco Bay Area specialize in Mission burritos. It is typically a large flour tortilla that is wrapped and folded around a variety of ingredients, served in a piece of aluminum foil.
Burrito sizism has given us the Mission burrito and all the commercial variants with names like Epic (above), Giant, Monster, Freakin’ Big, Honkin’ Huge, Atlas, Punisher, Mucho, Colossus, and so on (I am not making any of these up). As with dicks, so with burritos. To every man his taste, but I don’t want to deal with a guy who proudly calls his gigantic fat dick the Punisher any more than I want to get a burrito called the Punisher into my mouth and down my throat.
The tragedy of burrito sizism was illustrated for me recently by Gadi Niram, who posted this sad photo on the 26th:
(#6) Burrito containment failure (as Gadi referred to it) — the burritio analogue of coming in your pants
Let me recall to your attention the excellent hand-food human-scaled burritos in #2; if you’re still hungry after eating one, you could easily go on to more.
Meanwhile, note that (even abandoning all the stuff with the aluminum foil) these burritio instructions would be a terrible guide to fellatio: biting, chewing, and (literal) swallowing are to be avoided in fellatio; and licking a burrito (as in the bottom image in #1) is just silly, while licking dick is a normal, and mutually satisfying, component of fellatio. On to some details.`
Main event 3. When mouth meets tube: eating (food) and fellating (a penis) are both complex oral acts, differing significantly in detail, but similar enough overall that the general verb for the first act, eat, can be used as street slang to refer to the second. The general verb for the second act is either the technical fellate or the street slang suck; fellate has the virtue of having no other common use in modern English, while suck is transparently figurative. (As is the street slang blow.)
Both burritio and fellatio are coordinated acts involving the jaw, lips, and tongue and the muscles controlling them. Burritio also crucially involves the pharyngeal muscles (in swallowing); these play a crucial role in deep-throating dick, but the fashion for deep-throating seems to be relatively recent, not part of traditional cocksucking techniques, which centrally involve stimulation of his dickhead by encircling it, swirling your mouth around it, and stroking the top end of his cock with your lips and tongue — also stroking the shaft of his cock (especially the underside) by hand, licking it (see the bottom photo in #1), and stroking or sucking on his balls.
Teeth, for biting and chewing, are the main actors in burritio, while the supporting cast of lips and tongue help move things along. Conversely, lips and tongue are the stars of fellatio, and teeth are best avoided entirely.
Finally, I note that for some of us, fellatio is as deeply satisfying an experience for the fellator as it is for the fellatee (or, if you will, the fellato). Meanwhile, burritio is certainly satisfying for the burritor, but as far as I know, the burrito (or burritee) itself gains no pleasure from the experience.
Lexical notes. From my 1/22/17 posting “Poppin’ Fresh in a pink dress”:
Digression on two verbs eat. So far, it’s all been about the food verb eat (roughly ‘consume as food by mouth’). But we’re working up to creatures that cry out Eat me!, using the food verb but suggesting the slang sexual verb eat (of metaphorical origin: it all has to do with using your mouth). From GDoS:
to perform hetero- or homosexual fellatio or more usu. cunnilingus [first cite 1888-94 in My Secret Life] [or analingus, first cite 2000]
In gay contexts, sexual eat is a rough synonym of sexual suck, but is (for some speakers) somewhat more restricted in its syntax. Suck and eat both take the full range of direct objects referring to a penis:
I sucked / ate his (hot) cock / (big) dick / (thick) meat; the biggest one I ever sucked / ate; Suck / eat that monster! I love to suck / eat cock / dick …
Suck is also freely usable with direct objects referring to a man (understood as actually referring, metonymically, to that man’s penis):
I sucked him enthusiastically; the hottest guy I ever sucked; Suck my buddy! …
But many speakers are reluctant to use eat this way, and examples like the following seem to be rare:
I ate him enthusiastically; the hottest guy I ever ate; Eat my buddy! …
A striking exception here is is the imperative Eat me!, which is usable, and common, either as a true imperative (‘Suck my cock!’) or as a dismissive insult (very roughly, ‘Fuck off!’).
I also note that sexual suck is, like eat in general, an accomplishment verb in the Vendlerian scheme of aspectual classes (Aktionsarten) of verbs: it’s goal-oriented, but doesn’t entail that the goal is actually reached. The achievement verb corresponding to suck is suck off: I sucked him for half an hour (but he never came; or, alternatively, until he came), but I sucked him off in half an hour (then he came).
October 31, 2019 at 6:42 am |
I will attempt to remember the burrito-eating instructions the next time I get what the Purple Cactus in Jamaica Plain calls a “wrap” but is really a burrito; the last couple I’ve gotten there have completely fallen apart before I’ve finished them.