The Wrap Is the Wet Handshake of Tortillas

The Wrap—the pretentious, joyless burrito alternative that slithered into American lunch culture during the 1990s—remains an enduring insult, both culinary and conceptual. It is not a burrito, a falafel, or even a respectable sandwich. Those are categories with histories, boundaries, and soul. The Wrap, by contrast, is the menu equivalent of a corporate mission statement—vague, overpromising, and spiritually empty.

Marketed as healthy and progressive, it is in fact a sad slurry of “lite” mayonnaise, cold protein, and moral posturing, encased in a tortilla that resembles a damp résumé. The Wrap promises wellness but delivers wetness. Its cold, papery sheath—sometimes greenish with “spinach,” sometimes orangish with “tomato-basil”—cracks under the weight of its own self-importance.

A burrito is proud, hot, and complete—a working-class symphony of beans, rice, and molten cheese, wrapped in a warm, elastic tortilla designed to survive both gravity and appetite. The Wrap is its sterile cousin, born not in the markets of Juárez but in a boardroom buffet in Palo Alto. One feeds the soul; the other lectures it.

If the burrito is street poetry, the Wrap is PowerPoint. Burritos radiate grease-stained authenticity; wraps arrive pre-sliced at corporate retreats, accompanied by a motivational slogan.

And yet, there is something eerily modern about the Wrap—its prefab perfection, its sanitized efficiency. It is the edible ancestor of AI: an algorithm of health and convenience, engineered to look human but taste like compromise. The Wrap, in short, is the uncanny valley of lunch—soulless, identical, and faintly threatening. I fear, as with AI, that it may someday evolve, learn to mimic pleasure, and finally take over the world, one sad office lunch at a time.