Chipotle’s “Cultivating Thought” Campaign Stirs Up Controversy

When I received yesterday’s press release from Chipotle
announcing their
latest highbrow campaign involving the words of a host of illustrious
writers and personalities (Toni Morrison! Jonathan Safran Foer! Sarah
Silverman!) being featured on the food chain’s packaging, my inner literary
publicist’s persona applauded. Before
becoming a food and travel writer and editor, I spent almost ten years in
publicity at HarperCollins Publishers. However, when I scrolled down the list
of featured contributors, my outer Latina food editor’s persona jeered much
more loudly. As Gustavo Arrelano of the Orange County Weekly’s blog Stick
a Fork In It noted earlier today, nobody on the list is actually Latino.
I’m sorry, QUE?

“Not Pulitzer Prize-winning Junot
Diaz, who also won a
James Beard award for one of the finest pieces of food writing I’ve ever read,”
Arrelano writes. “Not the doña of Chicano literature, Sandra Cisneros.
Not best-selling author Luis
Alberto Urrea. Not Tex-Mex loco Dagoberto
Gilb. Not any other number of Latino authors who could easily
contribute a story or two that would be applicable a Mexican-food chain. Judd Apatow made the list–but not one Latino.”

What a shame!
Chipotle missed an incredible opportunity to align itself with the
ever-growing U.S. Latino population, celebrating not only its food, which
Chipotle has made a fortune selling, but also their culture. Latin America teems
with incredible writers from living legends like Isabel Allende, Laura
Esquivel, and Mario Vargas Llosa to nuanced voices like Daniel Alarcon, and
Chipotle (and Foer) had the opportunity to add such esteemed writers to the
general population’s consciousness. As
Arrelano writes:

“I
think it’s just the latest variation on a theme: take our food, ignore our
stories,” says Alex Espinoza, the acclaimed novelist of Still
Water Saints and
English professor at Fresno State. Along with longtime Weekly pal, Irvine Valley College English
professor Lisa Alvarez, Espinoza helped to start a Facebook page called Cultivating Invisibility: Chipotle’s Missing Mexicans to call out the company and Foer on their shit.”

We add our voice to Arrelano’s Chipotle grievances. As
we recently reported, there are wonderful Latino writers who have shared
their culinary adventures with the world. And, in addition to the many talented
living scribes that grace the bookshelves of Latin American culture, Chipotle
could’ve quoted the work of the many heavyweights of the past. A marketing coup
for Chipotle (and Foer as editorial director, perhaps) could have been easily curated
from the Chilean odes of Pablo Neruda to the Brazilian-born passages of Jorge
Amado to the deeply considered words of Portuguese Jose Saramago and Argentine
Jose Luis Borges. We count luminaries like the recently passed Colombian
Gabriel Garcia Marquez in our numbers and we celebrate writers like Mexican
Carlos Fuentes.

Latino voices abound. So do Chipotle storefronts. Wouldn’t
it have been a true accomplishment to pay it forward by looking back to the
hand that both inspires and feeds?