 Hi everybody, thanks for coming today. It's really a thrill to be part of Lit Quick. And when I was thinking about what to read today, I do have a cookbook, but it's not very heavy on the text. It's about quick recipes with more of a California focus that we have here in the Bay Area. But I wanted to go back. I do a lot of feature stories in the Chronicle, and I wanted to go back to an older story I wrote about the Mission Burrito. When I researched his story, I was pretty excited to find out that there is actually something special about the Mission Burrito compared to burritos elsewhere. And I think most of us probably have a great affinity and a love for the Mission Burrito. I know during college I definitely would survive on the burrito by getting one at lunch and eating half and then eating the rest for dinner. So things are a little better now, but I think the burrito serves an important role in the Bay Area. So the story is called, this is an excerpt. It's called The Silver Torpedo. The weighty one-of-a-kind Mission Burrito has reached cult status among its wide variety of fans. If it weren't for the Mission Burrito, Brad Vazquez might not be living in San Francisco. He might not even be alive, because for the Mission District poet, the burrito is not just an occasional meal. It is a way of life. I eat so many burritos that I have to make an effort not to, said Vazquez, whose email address includes the words all past store in honor of his favorite burrito meat. If I didn't try to make the effort to think of other things, I would eat one every night. Vazquez is part of a generation of artists, writers, and college graduates who came to the Mission in the late 80s and early 90s, writing out the recession in the then-cheap apartments. That was shelter. For food, they discovered the enormous burritos offered in neighborhood taquerias. They were so filling and so inexpensive that they could live off them alone. What fueled them was an invention unique to San Francisco. Today, mission-style burritos can be found across the country. Part of what makes them distinct is their vast array of ingredients. Whereas burritos in Southern California, the Southwest, and northern Mexico may contain perhaps just two or three items, the Mission Burrito puts an entire plate of food, meat, beans, rice, vegetables, salsa, cheese, sour cream, lettuce, inside a tortilla. These elements help the Mission Burrito reach an imposing weight of up to two pounds. More than an exercise in excess, the Mission Burrito is a symbol of Bay Area individuality. Nowhere but here is it standard to allow customers to choose each element of the burrito from the type of bean to the salsa. Despite its size, the burrito is also popular for its compactness. It can be taken anywhere and requires no fork. It's been called the cylindrical god, the silver torpedo, the urban food log. Books and websites are devoted to it, and the world's largest Mission Burrito at almost 4,500 pounds was rolled not far from the source, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, in Mountain View in 1998. Not everyone who first fell in love with the Mission Burrito in the early 90s can still eat one every day, and many no longer have to. But eating one brings them back to the pre-gentrification days, to the time before the Mission had restaurants with white tablecloths. The Mission Burrito, as we know it, got its start when La Cumbre, originally a Valencia street meat market, started making them in the 1960s. The date we sold our first burrito was September 29, 1969. I know that because it was my wife's birthday, said Raul Duran, owner and founder of Taqueria La Cumbre. It wasn't that the burrito was a new thing. It was the style of service that was revolutionary. Duran and his wife, Mikayla, who died several years ago, started out serving tacos and other foods to go. In 1972, they remodeled and changed their business to a taqueria. Taquerias were new. No one had anything like that, said Duran. Mexican restaurants have been around for, I don't know how long ever since before California joined the union. But this type of fast food, there was no such thing, he said. The burrito originally came from northern Mexico, a wheat producing area where flour tortillas are common. It was created as a portable meal for ranchers and miners. The burrito is named after the burros, which were known to be able to carry everything, said David Thompson, co-author of Burritos Hot on the Trail of the Little Burro. These were like the little burros because they carried all these ingredients, he said. The history is a little fuzzy, but it seems that the burrito is created in the early to mid 19th century by miners in what is now the American Southwest and Northern Mexico, said Thompson, who's a Palo Alto native and San Francisco resident. This was a cross pollination. The American border was pushing south in the 1840s, said Thompson. That's another reason burritos are ambiguous in their nationality because right when they were becoming a food, the nationality was changing. The original burrito consisted of a hunk of spice meat wrapped in a tortilla, and though larger, burritos in today's southwest aren't too different. The Texan, for example, tends to just have meat or beans and cheese. The New Mexican is similar, but smothered in green chili sauce. The Southern Californian and Northern Mexican usually just have meat and salsa, maybe beans. The mission burrito shows no such restraint. Burrito eaters in mission taquerias are forced to make some weighty decisions. Pinto beans are black, cheese are no cheese, hot salsa are mild, white tortilla are green. The end result becomes a pure expression of the burrito lover's taste. A skillful burrito maker adds just the right portion of beans and rice and can do wonder with a piece of tinfoil. When done properly, the burrito is a tidy, tightly wrapped cylinder that can stand upright. With a combined carbohydrate power of a 12th flour, tortilla and rice, not to mention the volatile force of beans and spice meat. Eating an entire mission burrito in one sitting can be cause for regret. The mission burrito's virtual indigestibility is part of what makes it so endearing to its fans. But that doesn't make key people from eating the whole thing. I heard a guy at the taquerias say the other day there's nothing illegal about having two burritos a day, said Vasquez. Thank you. Thank you.