Pizza Is the Most Utilitarian Food

Time to love some pizza.

Artwork by @the_real_meep

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Social media is rife with many requisite high-voltage takes about a wide range of inconsequential topics, and it’s easy to get all our wrathfulness pointed in the same direction. One of the most notable in the normie sphere is the question of whether pineapple belongs on pizza. The fundamental scam and scuzz underpinning the popular ire for this specific tropical fruit scans as safe edginess, a thin veneer of humor. You can mog someone online or even at work over their preferred type of pizza instead of something that reveals a commitment to any kind of discernable ideals. It’s a zero-risk issue to feel passionate about, a way to have a hot take with no social implications. Personally, it’s not my go-to topping, but in certain contexts, it’s enjoyable enough—though, I will never understand why pineapple prompts so many feigned dramatic reactions. Have some balls and go to bat for anchovies.

While it is pretty fundamentally American to get worked up over junk food, I won’t waste any more time debating optimal pizza toppings, because that squabble misses the more important issue.

Pizza is the most utilitarian of foods. No matter what mood you’re in, pizza will immediately improve it:

• Happy

• Stoned

• Sobbing uncontrollably for days after a breakup

• Shoving a dead body into your trunk

• Kicking a sick cat

• Bullying the elderly

• Warding off the dark voices in your head

• Mid-afternoon panic attacks in the office bathroom

• Stealing your neighbor’s disability checks

• Drunk

I remember when Michelle Obama declared pizza a vegetable in 2011 just so public schools could appear healthier without actually having to do anything about feeding children disgusting slop. And she was dogpiled by seething blobs whose children began to sweat at the sight of lettuce without a burger patty under it. Those were the days when America was American.

Also, having a strong opinion about foods is more fun when it’s on a regional scale instead of an individual preference.

As someone who grew up just outside of New Haven, this is the only correct way of ordering pizza from best to worst (fight me in the comments):

• Italian, New York, or New Haven wood- or coal-fired pizza with a thin and slightly charred crust: Real Pizza.

• Reheated greasy New York dollar-slice with dog pepperoni: Pretty good pizza.

• Homemade thick-crust pizza stone/castiron pizza: Pizza-pilled at home with girlfriend maxxing good pizza.

• Shitty Dominios with plastic cheese but you are starving and a bit drunk on plastic jug vodka and cranberry juice: Git in my mouf!!

• A Costco slice: School cafeteria-tier pizza.

• Papa John’s: You order a medium one-topping pizza and get the complimentary garlic dipping sauce, and as you leave the store, you’ll throw the pizza in the garbage and keep the sauce for another pizza that you ordered to your apartment.

• Chicago deep-dish pizza: I’m not even lactose-intolerant, but I ate my girlfriend’s Lactaid before gorging on this cheese casserole and it felt like I was taking digestive steroids. That night, I was the Barry Bonds of shitting. Barely pizza.

What I’m trying to say is that you can’t really fuck up pizza to the point where it’s objectively bad, unless you are a sentient short bus with no arms and a garbage gas oven.

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