IF YOU don’t know the answer, go to your local Papa John’s and reflect on its theological implications.

A reader below explains.

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THE MODERN apocalypse leads with inexorable logic to pizza vending machines. Rene Lyon reports at Los Angeles Times that European pizza machines are coming to America this year. Read More »

DRINA writes:

You have clarified before that homemade pizza is a perfectly good and acceptable food. Perhaps some of your readers who aren’t ready to give up pizza would consider making their own? I challenge them to make their own pizza for a few months and then try going back to cheese-product topped cardboard if they dare.

Pizza is on our family menu at least once a month, and we usually enjoy three basic kinds: regular tomato sauce, Alfredo sauce, and pesto. Read More »

PAUL writes:

I love your fight against pizza. You might even be right. I love it because it shows you are a normal person. What I’m about to say will be like one of those awful slasher movies to you, but you know I respect your views. Read More »

I HAVE tirelessly attempted to prove to readers of this site that pizza is the Trojan Horse of Western society. I realize that many readers remain unconvinced, even to the point of consuming Domino’s two or three times a week.

Some people believe I bear some perverse grudge against pizza, which is the staff of life, and that this grudge probably has something to do with a messed-up childhood, failure to succeed or deeply embedded sexual repression.

So be it. I march on. It’s not easy being a pizza prophet — nor should it be.

Here is one more example of how pizza and the downfall of the West are inextricably linked. The Dallas-based chain Pizza Patron is giving free pizza to anyone who orders in Spanish.

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I JUST received notice that my local Domino’s is featuring the chain’s new line of “Artisan Pizzas.” Last year, when they were introduced, CEO Patrick Doyle said, “We have never launched anything that showcases our quality ingredients and craftsmanship quite like Artisan Pizza.”

This is interesting. Mass retail has led to such stunning ugliness and uniformity that it now uses that calamity for its own purposes. The mere mention of the word “craftsmanship” or “artisan” is capable of  obliterating the physical reality of Chicken and Bacon Carbonara Pizza in favor of an imaginary vision. That’s how powerful words are. People are now buying Domino’s pizza because they crave something it can never provide.

The Associated Press reported last week that Domino’s first-quarter profit fell 24 percent. But its restaurants are still going strong. Among those open for at least a year, business increased by two percent in the U.S. and almost five percent abroad.

Domino’s can do many remarkable things with its stores around the world, but the one thing it positively cannot do is create anything artisanal. To be artisanal, something must bear the stamp of an individual human being. Mass retail is like mass government, it creates drones. It produces a state of such stupefying dependency and uniformity that the dream of craftsmanship can be awakened with a charred Domino’s crust.

THE Hot Dog Stuffed Crust Pizza has been officially introduced, but in Great Britain only. Call Pizza Hut today and complain. While you’re at it, ask about the possibility of a French Fry Stuffed Crust Pizza for vegetarians.

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Lucas Cranach the Elder depicted the Silver Age. Will any artist capture the Age of Pizza?

THE website Dash offers a brisk history of pizza in the United States, culminating in the Pizza Society, with 65,000 pizzerias (that’s an understatement; there are 65,000 pizzerias in my town alone) and 100 acres of pizzas consumed every year.

Dash points to the emergence of the artisanal, wood-fired pie in recent decades. It’s true, pizza at its best is one of the world’s most sublime foods. However, pizza in America is generally not at its best, not anymore. The elite dines on charred, organic pies while the common man, who no longer has a real family or a real home, feasts on greasy slabs of fiberglass covered with mock cheese, a substance that haunts his dreams and creates a leaden, ineffable awareness that something – something — is profoundly wrong.

Dash forgot to mention the children who carry cold slices in their school lunch day after day; the college students who gorge on pizza late at night, bewildered by the transition from normal life to a depersonalized, pagan subculture of binge drinking and serial hook-ups; the divorced fathers who can’t afford anything other than pizza for dinner and the empty cardboard pizza boxes piled in corporate offices, where employees sit at their desks struggling silently with Pizza Impasse Disorder, indigestion that comes in both acute and chronic forms.

The history of pizza is no longer cause for celebration. Only slick advertising can erase the truth. The Greek poet Hesiod identified five Ages of Man: the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, the Heroic Age and the Iron Age. We are immersed in something he could not have foreseen: the Pizza Age. Someday even our rivers will turn red with excreted tomato sauce. There will be so much pizza in our bloodstreams that doctors will have to open de-mozzarella-fication clinics. As people sit in reclining chairs, the cheese globules painstakingly extracted from their veins by sophisticated technology, they will see their internal horizons gradually expanded and restored. Their souls and bodies will return to a state of innocence they never knew existed.

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ACADEMICS setting up interdisciplinary programs in pizza studies would be well advised to add child psychology to the mix. A story in The Daily Mail confirms my long-held suspicion that juvenile delinquency is related to pizza consumption. A pizzeria in Georgia has posted a notice on its menu telling parents to take misbehaving children outside. The notice was prompted by numerous instances of unruliness by juvenile patrons. One child threw a toy at a customer’s head.

The restaurant is on to something. These children were probably in the advanced stages of pizza dementia, which is caused by consuming pizza more than five times a week. The extremely dangerous condition may also be caused by eating pizza in more than three forms, such as cheesey-gooey pizza toppers or double-crusted pizza frisbees, over the course of several days. The bloodstream can handle only so many fake-mozzarella enzymes before it sends disturbing messages to the developing brain.

Nothing short of drastic measures will correct the resulting behavioral disorder. These parents should not just take their uncontrollable offspring outside, they should put them in pizza detox immediately.

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IT WAS after three weeks of fasting that the prophet Daniel received revelation from God. Abstinence from food lifts the mind to higher things. It prepares the way for wisdom.

Since tomorrow is the beginning of Lent, it’s worth calling to mind the purpose of fasting. The fast teaches self-restraint, not just in regard to food but with all desires and impatience. After fasting, we may mysteriously seem less petulant  and quick to annoyance. It trains the will, enabling it to acquire more endurance and strength. It also serves as reparation for sin, relieving us of nagging migraines of guilt, of which we may be partially unconscious. Read More »

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TRACY writes:

I came across your site and read several of your posts. I am assuming that you are a white female, probably middleclass/upper middleclass. Quite frankly what you were writing and your opinions are appalling. I seriously, seriously suggest you see a therapist. No one can live with that much hate and negativity in their soul. 

Seriously.

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THOSE readers still undecided as to how to stuff their Thanksgiving bird may wish to consider this recipe. I have not tried it, but it looks sensational. You might consider adding a pound of cubed mozzarella.

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A Congressional spending bill released on Monday would allow schools to define pizza as a vegetable under Department of Agriculture regulations. This is long overdue recognition that in the Age of Pizza, pizza is a vegetable.

Pizza is a vegetable in the same way pea pods and squash are vegetables. Pizza grows on thick green stalks that come from tiny pizza seeds (under a magnifying glass they look like tiny pies). Read More »

THE New York Times reports today: “The pizza, it turns out, is political.” This is somewhat like saying, “The ocean, it turns out, is salty.” Pizza is political, social, economic, and philosophical. Pizza is everything.

According to a survey, Republicans, because of Herman Cain, like Godfather’s Pizza. Democrats don’t. (You can see the Godfathers Pizza Index here, which raises the question as to why there is no National Pizza Index, which might give us an idea of daily consumption throughout the nation.)

There is no serious political faction in this country challenging the Pizza Industrial Complex. It’s all one form or another of partisan pizza-ship.

LYDIA SHERMAN writes:

This is a few days late getting to you but it is tremendous. It is Herman Cain on Jimmy Kimmel Live responding to sexual harassment charges. I love the banter of this man, like the “real American” men used to speak, unself-conscious and without fear or PC, and, his elocution, enunciation, articulation, etc. are excellent. By the way, he is introduced in this way, “Our next guest has never held a public office, but he does know what is most important to Americans: pizza!” Read More »

I WAS initially moved to tears by Herman Cain’s rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Cain, former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, imagines a world without pizza. As soon as he sang the words, “Imagine there’s no pizza,” the dam broke and I wept, envisioning an America devoid of discarded crusts. The Pizza Industrial Complex fell away. I was brought to reality again when the politician bellowed, “Give pizza a chance.” There are many things that deserve a chance. Pizza is not one of them.

It is only a matter of time before America has a pizza president.  Read More »

INGRID writes:

Thanks for publishing Josaphine’s story the other day. I have often thought about writing my own story, of how liberalism almost ruined my life, as a way to warn others. I was lucky – I had a few “eye-opening” events when I was still young enough to change course without any long-term damage or problems, although like anyone else, I suffer the consequences of some of my past mistakes. I had already radically changed the course of my life when I discovered your blog, but I have been reading it since you started writing and it has been one of several important influences on me. Read More »