It’s been the Hull Yum! Festival over the last few days, and honestly they couldn’t have picked a worse weekend, sadly, as it’s been raining so hard a flood warning has been issued, which rather puts a dampener on open-air eating.

Still, on Friday the weather was still pretty good, so at lunch I went to one of the street vendors that had popped up opposite work:

Anyone hate their digestive system enough to try this?

I didn’t take them up on their Big Burrito Challenge, because I value my digestive system (up to and including my asshole) too much, but I did get a regular-sized burrito, and it was good. I had pulled pork, which I love, with all the usual rice and cheese and gloop you’d expect, and I wasn’t disappointed.

I had a burrito from a street vendor while I was over in Portland this spring, and while that one was easily twice the size and half the price, I don’t think it really tasted any better. So that’s something.

In other food news, I just finished reading Giles Coren’s How to Eat Out, which was really quite brilliant, and along with Will Self’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker leads me to believe I might need to start reading more of a certain kind of food criticism (i.e.: not Michael Winner).

Anyway, Coren had this to say about the humble ‘burg, which I thought rung true:

[The fetishization of meat, particularly steak] allows all these wretched chains to pester me endlessly to come and compare their burgers with everybody else’s. They have incredibly inflated, superlative-inducing names: Ultimate Burger, Gourmet Burger, Wicked Blinding Mental Burger with Knobs On; and they all boast grass-fed, arse-licked, pan-killed, stone-seared fillet of a half-cow/half-mermaid Sports Illustrated cover girl, ground by pixies and char-tickled over baby maple sapling smoke… and you get there, and it’s just another minced mammal in a bap. And you’re either in the mood or you’re not. That’s how it is with burgers: sometimes they taste like the best in the world, and sometimes they don’t. And it has everything to do with you, and how you’re feeling, and nothing at all to do with the object itself.

‘Burging is a state of mind, it seems, though I still hold that the peanut-butter-pickle-bacon burger at Killer Burger is the best I’ve ever tasted, minced mammal in a bap or not.