Yup, that is right. We are not asking you how many Burritos can you engine cook with its heat, but we want to know how many miles your vehicle can go on a single Burrito. If it can go many, many miles on the energy of a single Burrito, then is it more efficient than the human body? The big question we are looking at is- which will run the most on a single Burrito? It could be your car, your bike or even you. This crazy idea comes from a T-Shirt that says “53 miles per Burrito” (You can see the image at the top, can’t you?)
The moment I think of the word ‘Burritos’ I can’t but think about ‘Ratatouille’ and Chef Skinner. Love his line where he says, “But Gusteau already has a face and it sells Burritos… Millions and millions of Burritos”. Okay, so maybe I have gone a bit tangential there, but when you are talking about something like Burritos, I suppose you are allowed a bit of liberty. A little bit of research tells us that riding a light-weight bicycle consumes about 35 calories per mile. Walking consumes about 100 calories per mile and is, of course, considerably slower.
We generally can eat about 2,000 calories per day. If that food was converted to biofuel (as most of it could, since most of it is carbohydrates) it would drive a car less than a mile. But if I use it to bike, I could go 57 miles. That is more than any car or bike in the world. This is not to say that we are the most efficient engines on the planet. But what’s much more inefficient is the fact that 95% of the net weight of a car is car… Only 5% is the driver. With a bike, the equation is shifted significantly toward the weight of the driver, not the vehicle. Only 65 of the 1800 calories used to move the car are used to move the driver. The rest is used to move the doors and the roof and the airbags and all the other crap around.
So at the end of the day, if you had just one Burrito of energy left with you in the world and you had to travel as far as you could, then what would be you ideal choice? The answer to that is simple cycling. You can take that one Burrito of energy and cycle further than any vehicle known to man today. It is the combination of simple mechanics and evolution (our own body) that comes out on top.
