Wrap It Up

In my dotage, I appreciate the gifts to society that young people bring every day. Imagine a world without 3-D printing, E-readers, digital technology, retinal implants, crowdfunding, The Cloud, and the new improved Italian BMT at Subway ("Big. Meaty. Tasty. Get it.")

And here in Baltimore at the world-famous Johns Hopkins University, some brilliant young minds have come up with something the world sorely needed for a long time.

They call it Tastee Tape! It's a tape made of food-grade fibers and an organic adhesive.  What this tape does, it holds a burrito closed while it cooks and while you eat it, making sure that all the goodness packed inside stays inside.

And I say the world sorely needed it, because in the dark pre-Tastee Tape era, benighted burrito makers would use a toothpick to hold everything together, leading to sad scenes in which hapless burrito consumers would impale the roof of their gobbling mouths with a toothpick.

Ouch!

 

True scientists, the students ran through a few different ingredients before coming up with the finished product. And they were clever enough to add a harmless blue dye to the tape so that it photographs better.  Marketing 101!  

"The girl who came up with the idea, one of our team members, Erin (Walsh), she was eating her burrito one day, and it was during the beginning of the semester when we had to come up with these ideas, and it was just everywhere, and she was like you know what, this is a problem to be fixed," JHU senior Tyler Guarino told WBAL TV here in Baltimore, the proud home of this lifesaving product. Gaurino was quoted on a Hopkins press release as promising that product has "the tensile strength you can trust to hold together a fat burrito."

"This was a problem to be fixed." Let that be engraved on the statue of Ms Walsh on the Hopkins campus.

When Tastee Tape hits your local grocery shelves, it will be in the form of half-inch wide, two-inch long rectangular strips, affixed to waxed paper, which I guess can be used to wrap your burrito.

I tell you, we might not have enough baby formula in this country, but doggone if we're gonna have burritos spilling all over the place anymore!