Tex-Mex Chain’s “Big Burrito Challenge” Offers Chance to Win a Burial Plot

This Tex-Mex restaurant promotion offers an unusual prize — a burial plot.

Everyone from death doulas to spiritual guides have preached the benefits of contemplating your death as a way to live better in the present. In an off-handed way, the bizarre “Big Burrito Challenge” in Australia is encouraging people to do just that.

Created by the popular restaurant chain Mad Mex (you have to live up to a name like that, right?), it challenges patrons to eat a 1 kilogram (2.2 pound) burrito. In one selfie video, a patron cradles the bulging creation like it’s an infant, and the resemblance to the bulk of a newborn is striking.

As part of the promotional gimmick, contestants wash down the high-carb feast with a complimentary can of Liquid Death, an Australian water brand with a cult following — its marketing tagline is “murder your thirst.”

As the company states on its website, “Our evil mission is to make people laugh and get more of them to drink more healthy beverages more often, all while helping to kill plastic pollution.”

A gravedigger in the “Big Burrito Challenge” commercial explains the potential hazard of consuming Mad Mex’s mega burrito.

The laugh the two companies are going for in the “Big Burrito Challenge” is that ingesting the massive tube of dense, tortilla-wrapped calories might kill you. Or as the quirky gravedigger in the Mad Mex commercial puts it, “you could slip peacefully into the mother of all food comas — one that could be permanent.” Therefore, the winner is awarded a burial plot, just in case. As part of the entry process, contestants are required to write an epitaph for their tombstone.

Undoubtedly, contestants are going to go for humor, but contemplating what you’d seriously like to have inscribed on your tombstone is considered a healthy exercise at any age.

So, SevenPonds invites you to create your own epitaph-writing moment. Pick your favorite guilty pleasure — a fat slice of cheesecake, an everything bagel with a schmear, a pint of cookie dough ice cream, an oversized portion of lasagna, whatever — and while you enjoy your treat, seriously contemplate and jot down what you’d like to see on your tombstone. It will sharpen your focus for living today.

Share your to-die-for-indulgence and epitaph in the comments.