I’ve added all of the Portland-area locations of Chipotle  to the Portland Gluten Free Map, because I’m  always looking for fast, healthy food that is completely safe.

If you haven’t been to Chipotle yet, it’s a lot of fun (or very embarrassing, depending on your personality) to see what they do when you tell them you’re celiac and need to be completely gluten free. I always get the bowls.

They change out all of the spoons they’ll be using for you. They wash their hands and change their gloves. This is at all of the locations I’ve been to. If they won’t do this, of course, you should probably just walk out since they smack those spoons on burrito shells all day.

I’ve never been cross-contaminated by gluten there, as of this writing.

Great Company Culture

My wife got us some take-out recently when we helped paint a friends’ house. The woman who helped her was new, and when she heard the word celiac, she was super-excited that she knew what to do. She jumped to attention and went through the whole drill. We made her day!

Chipotle is hardly most original or flavorful Mexican food in Portland, but they must be doing something right over at their corporate training headquarters.

Perspective

Now, you’ll probably have heard about their food-borne illness scares. What’s the point of not getting glutened if you’re going to catch E. coli? Well, let’s do those numbers: A total of 60 people were sickened in November, 2015. No one was killed.

I looked up the number of people Chipotle was able to serve each day before their business took a hit from scandal: around 750,000. That means my chance of being sick from eating there, (I estimate I went there 8 times in 2015) would have been (60*8)/(750000*365) = 1 in more than 570,000. My chance of dying from lightning is 1 in 174,426. (If someone is better at probabilities than I am, please correct me.)

There’s so much to be afraid of, I like to keep my anxieties in perspective. They’re still struggling. They’re a giant corporation, but this is one that’s done a lot of good for celiacs, so I try to support them when I can.

* By the way, I wasn’t paid for this post, and the use of their logo doesn’t mean they endorse this blog. #hailcorporate