Chipotle Fans Are Loving Its Recent Post That Pokes Fun At Cilantro Haters
People who dislike Chipotle often claim that the cilantro with which they fill their burritos tastes like soap. However, with the Internet (and SEO) being what it is, any attempt at finding people who claim this without any self-awareness results in articles explaining why Chipotle may remind people of soap.
Still, Chipotle's marketing team knows of these hypothetical discontents. So, the brand posted a rejoinder on Instagram. "Ok," Chipotle wrote, "but what if soap tasted like cilantro?" Apprehended to the thought is a picture of cilantro-scented soap with Chipotle branding.
Fans loved the chain's willingness to poke fun at itself. Between the hour of the post's upload and the writing of this article, 10,440 people had already liked the image. "Then I would eat that soap," multiple people declared. Others offered similar answers, saying "I'll buy." One person, however, put their thumb on the issue of Chipotle's joke. "We wouldn't know what it tastes like so we can't give you an answer," they noted. Obviously, if cilantro tastes like soap and soap tastes like cilantro, changing the object tasted would not do anything to address the taste.
So, where have all these claims come from?
The base claim that cilantro and, by extension, Chipotle's food taste like soap comes from the DNA shared by a largish group of Europeans and their descendants. Taste of Home explains that, while 14 to 21 percent of Europeans, East Asians, and Africans dislike cilantro, the former consistently exhibit a DNA variation that means they taste cilantro as soap. "A common genetic variation was found among the cilantro haters that's associated with the trait in a subset of people with European ancestry."
However, it is, in fact, easier to find explanations of the hatred than examples of the hatred itself. This is largely because of all the SEO articles that have been written to explain why cilantro tastes like soap, which write and rewrite the phrase "cilantro tastes like soap" and so attract the attention of your search engine more readily than a one-off comment. With some searching, though, groups do emerge, such as an anti-cilantro subreddit. They exist. They just don't draw as much attention to themselves as the cilantro-lovers who try to counter how anyone could hate Chipotle.