The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel is an engineering marvel that stretches underneath the US from coast to coast, whisking San Francisco mission burritos to hungry New Yorkers. Originally built as a pneumatic mail tube in 1933, the tunnel fell out of use with the advent of air travel before being repurposed to carry burritos in 1979.

The tunnel is also, unfortunately, fictional. It’s the brainchild of Maciej Cegłowski, who published a fictional pop-sci article on the tunnel on his blog “Idle Words” in 2007. The piece is one of my all-time favorite works of internet fiction, because it perfectly captures the style of science magazine pieces, like you might find in Popular Mechanics, while simultaneously being incredibly absurd.

The piece manages to tell you all sorts of fun facts about the tunnel – the history of its construction, the boon to geologists, and the technology used to keep the burritos flowing. It also manages to avoid even referencing the question of how the heck workmen in the 1920s bored a perfectly straight tunnel thousands of miles through the Earth’s Upper Mantle.

I am well experienced in explainers. But I am decidedly a novice when it comes to San Franciscan cuisine. As Inkhaven is being hosted in Berkeley, it seemed only appropriate to travel into SF itself to get a taste of those famous mission burritos. I met my friend Sasha at El Farolito, the very restaurant in the Mission mentioned in the opening paragraph of the Idle Words piece. I ordered an al pastor burrito, he ordered a chicken one.

And I even managed to snap a photo before I devoured it all!

As expected, the burrito was excellent. Comparing an actual Mission burrito to Chipotle is probably an insult akin to comparing New York Pizza to Domino’s. But in case you’ve never had the chance to experience one yourself, it’s like a Chipotle burrito but faster, cheaper, and way better.

Much like a mission burrito, the big notes of Cegłowski’s piece are well executed. Actual popular science writing has an undertone of “This is why you, random member of the public, should care about this.” Each section of the article perfectly captures this tone. The journey a burrito takes from restaurant counter to coil gun to being perfectly warmed by the heat of the aesthenosphere. The Nebraska geologist who conducts research through an access shaft. The local politician touting the jobs benefits.

But also like a burrito, it’s the juicy details tucked into the main article that make it so enjoyable. Taquerias had to switch to a salsa with lower magnetic permittivity to avoid interfering with the tunnel’s electromagnets. The Loma Preta earthquake required “extensive redrilling”. New York and New England have an ongoing debate about tomatoes in the copycat “Northeastern Chowder Viaduct”.

Cegłowski also neatly slots the burrito tunnel into real history. Real life personalities play major roles, from financier Andrew W. Mellon funding the initial construction, to President Jimmy Carter agreeing to subsidize the tunnel in exchange for its geothermal power, to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff discussing tunnel security post-9/11. The verisimilitude is perfect, except for the one insignificant point of how the tunnel was actually dug. But at risk of killing the joke, that’s the entire point.

When science fiction becomes science fact, it loses much of its wonder in the public eye. Actual human beings flew to the actual Moon using a skyscraper-sized controlled explosion with technology from the 1960s, and science history articles have to convince readers why they should care. (Space travel is so cool, kids! Did you know NASA invented memory foam?) If an Alameda-Weehawken burrito tunnel really was built in the 30s, I guarantee you people would view it as mundane by 2007. And it would be up to articles like this to bring a fraction of that magic back.

Coming Soon: Tides are more complicated than you think