Celery sticks have so little flavour I need to add salt (or peanut butter) to make it worthwhile.
Where celery shines, though, is in making mirepoix. A base of cut carrots, onions and celery (peppers too) is the basis for many fine soups, sauces and stews.
For the first sentence, I would say that applies to any crudité vegetable. Or, rather, that celery has as much flavor as carrots or cauliflower or peppers or whatnot. None of which I want unless they’re drenched in blue cheese dressing. 
As for the second, if they’re so flavorlesss, why would they shine in a mirepoix? Obviously, it’s because they aren’t flavorless.
I like the mild flavour of celery. There’s a difference between eating something wrong and cooking it, though. I like celery salt too.
Darren, you really should start an “Ask the guy who is completely uninterested in food” thread. I can think of a million questions I’d like to ask, as your attitude is startling and alien to me. If you’d be willing to start such a thread, I’ll read it with great interest and ask many questions.
How are you figuring that the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a run-of-the-mill nonprofit organization with what seem to be pretty much conventional and mainstream positions on improving general nutrition, is “dipshittier” than an actual anti-vaccination advocate?
Thanks, but an “AMA about a topic that I don’t really know or care much about” thread? I simply have other things that I’d rather spend my time and money on than worrying about food. For example, reading. Spending a long time lingering over a multi-course meal would be wasted dead time to me. I’d rather (for instance) microwave a 99 cent frozen cheeseburger that I could eat with one hand so that I can continue to read a book with the other (or manipulate a mouse.)
For whatever reason, celery has more flavor when cooked than raw.
And whatever else you might say about their flavors, carrots and peppers are definitely sweet.
Oh, absolutely. Carrots are my “sweetness” ingredient for soups and stews. I don’t particularly find green peppers sweet, though. Red peppers, definitely. Green peppers are just grassy and, well, “green” to me, in a similar way to celery. (Looking it up, green pepper only has slightly more sugar than celery, with 2.4g per 100g vs 1.8g sugar per 100g in celery. Red peppers are 4.2g per 100g, and carrots are 4.7g per 100g, noticeably sweeter than both.)
Getting back to the original topic, a thought: Given that some young folks are unfamiliar with bay leaves, on finding them in their food. Chipotle workers are mostly the peers of those same young folks, and so you’d expect a similar proportion of them to be unfamiliar with them, too. They’re probably not the ones actually adding the bay leaves: Knowing how fast food works, there’s probably a bag of pre-seasoned rice that they get from somewhere further up the Chipotle’s supply chain, that they just open and empty into a steamer. And if any of those workers ever thought to ask their manager what that leaf was, they’d probably be told something like “It’s just a seasoning; don’t worry about it”. And so the guy behind the counter assembling the burrito bowl doesn’t know to take it out, and if he’s ever asked about it, he’s likely to answer something that very easily gets telephoned into “maybe it’s basil, I guess?”.
The sniff test is exactly what I do as well, every time – because my wife is allergic to cilantro.
But I generally don’t wrap my produce in plastic, so when it’s on the belt, it shouldn’t be hard to distinguish.
You misunderstand! It wouldn’t be a thread about food - it would be a thread about YOU. Surely that’s a subject you know and care about 
For example, I’d ask nosy questions like how you were raised, how old you are, if it has affected your social life (so much socializing is done around food), what your weight is like, if you’ve had any health issues, whether you think your tastebuds are less sensitive than other people’s…and on and on.
However, you are obviously under no obligation to satisfy my curiosity. If you are ever bored enough to consider an AMA thread, though, please do it!