Oh God. Why Chipotle? WHY!?!

I am a man who loves to eat. So much so that my fiancé predicts fatness in my future since I absolutely will NOT stop stuffing my face with food in front of me. I will clean my plate two or three times and still polish off her portion of whatever scrumtious meal we had. A food that I don't like is a verifiably rare commodity; I've run into maybe two or three in my gorging on the craziest fare the North American and Asian continents have to offer.

That's right; I love dog meat and fried locusts. Duck's blood, spam, and fertilized chicken fetuses fresh from the egg. I've even been known to enjoy brussel sprouts.

And so it is with great and terrible sorrow that I seem to have developed a new food allergy to that massively scrumtious, essential part of any American fast food lover: the Chipotle burrito.

I had one for lunch for the first time in a month or so last Thursday, and then started to break out in hives all over my body. I've never gotten hives from anything, ever in my life, and my only three known allergies are all synthetic, man-made pharmaceutical drugs.

So what do I do? I gulp down some Benadryl to help with the hives and take a few puffs of an old asthma inhaler to calm my poor fiancé's worries that I would choke to death in the night on my swollen windpipe, wondered briefly what set it off, and went about my business as usual.

Maybe it was my afternoon run, since I haven't exercised in months. Maybe it was the beautiful spring weather we've had in the DC area lately, with all the pollen and junk that floats about. I hadn't eaten anything even remotely unusual except for the Chipotle, but I've been eating that for four years, so it can't be that, right?

But my Friday morning jog, carefully retracing my steps with Benadryl in my pocket to try and see if I'd get a reaction, produced nothing. I ate all the other foods that I had on Thursday, and still nothing. I even wore the same clothes, just to be sure. Nada. And then I had Chipotle again. Within a half hour I was getting hives again, with a vengeance. My face was puffing up and part of my neck, which finally forced me to begrudgingly accept the fact that it might choke off my windpipe one day if I kept it up.

Then again, "Death by Chipotle" doesn't sound like such a bad way to go, does it?