JOHN P. writes:

I’ve been following the occasional discussion at your site on pizza and modern food with some interest and I’d like to offer a dissenting opinion. I think there may be some mythologising going on here. I’ll concede the point that young people probably eat too much pizza but in principle a dish made up of meat, cheese, green peppers and tomatoes, etc. is not so bad. Same thing for the various wraps available at fast food places.

Contrast this with the diet my parents had as children: boiled potatoes, boiled cabbage, boiled carrots and a bit of fish, almost seven days a week. They might have a small portion of beef on Sunday. Everything was boiled, no roasting, and maybe some frying. They had porridge with milk and brown sugar for breakfast every single day. The English-speaking people have never been notable for the excellence of their indigenous cuisine.

Even a cheeseburger with lettuce, pickles and tomatoes is not inherently bad except that people overindulge. I would argue that modern fast food is viewed with distaste because the standards of cuisine for educated people has risen enormously since WWII and not because it is worse than what most people were eating a century ago. This refers to the English-speaking world, not Italy or France where food was taken more seriously.

Laura writes:

I disagree. Pizza as we know it represents the death of civilization. Fast food is spiritual starvation. 

In modern times, the end of civilization is not chaotic, but orderly and convenient. On the surface, it is smoothly functioning and even appealing. But the sky might as well be falling and barbarians might as well be rushing into our homes.  So serious is the loss of civility, beauty, courtesy, wonder, and love – all the things that distinguish human beings from animals and civilization from mere survival.

Pizza is just bread with tomatoes and cheese, and I agree with you that there is nothing objectionable about that in itself. As an occasional treat, especially when it is homemade, it is not bad at all. But in its pervasive, modern, industrial foamboard incarnation, pizza is animal feed. It is so radically inferior to the simple boiled cabbage and potatoes of your parents’ childhood that it’s impossible to consider them in the same category. One is denatured factory fare. The other is field and sun. One is a cash transaction. The other is mutual aid. One is sloth. The other is labor. One is commerce. The other is love.

Your grandmothers took cabbage and potatoes, cut them up and then made them into food for their families. They might even have grown these foods in their own gardens. (Regardless, the cabbage and potatoes they used would have been much higher in nutrients than the cabbage and potatoes found in most stores today.) Your grandmothers were not paid workers when they did this work. They were not making food for strangers. Even if they made these things poorly, there was something personal about their neglect. Your parents sat around family tables to consume their cabbage and potatoes. Their small portion of beef on Sunday was part of a time-honored ritual, part of a day devoted to leisure even for the poorest man. And when people feuded at the table or disagreed with one another, even when children misbehaved, there was something personal about their interactions. They talked and cooperated. They did more than grab slices from a greasy box and eat them with their hands. They didn’t sit in a communal dining hall sipping soda with strangers. They didn’t watch television with the cardboard boxes splayed before them. The shared cabbage was more than food. It was  the rhythm of nature, the struggle for existence and human order. It was a meal with form and structure. Food has an ethical dimension and simple food is not necessarily coarse when part of a shared ritual. 

At the end of the meal, that greasy box sits on the table. Does anyone think fondly of it? Will anyone wistfully recall the greasy pizza boxes of their childhood the way they might recall their grandmother’s simple noodles or the roast beef that infused the house with its smell? I remember once showing up at my grandmother’s house when I was a child and she made me a simple ham sandwich with ham she had roasted the day before. It was one of the best meals I have ever had in my whole life. There was something mysteriously good about it.

Fast food and convenience wraps, paninis, nachos and McMeals have dumbed down food preparation so much that many people have no cultural memory of dishes like cabbage and potatoes, meals that are cheap, satisfying and extremely easy to make. It takes about 20 minutes and $5 to make a meal of cabbage and potatoes, not counting the time spent shopping. It’s an excellent meal, as long as the cabbage is not overcooked. I could easily eat it five nights a week.

The English-speaking world does indeed have a history of good food and fast food is a radical break with this history, as different from the food of the past as Soviet architecture is from a gabled and turreted Victorian building or a small thatched cottage. The French and Italians are more sensual and intelligent with food, but the English-speaking world historically fed itself well, with the different ethnic groups expressing their ties to the past and their connection to land and sea in their own ways. Meat pies, biscuits, fresh cheeses, simple vegetables, homemade breads with fresh butter, broiled fish, roast potatoes –  these are all traditional British and American soul food. In Victorian times, even a humble, middle class family might put a white tablecloth on the table for a weeknight dinner of any of these simple things.  

One in three Americans is now obese and the country’s disastrous weight gain parallels the growth in convenience foods. I disagree with those who think large numbers of people can stay in good health on fast food that is lower in carbohydrates or healthier in other ways. There can be better fast food and it doesn’t need to be as devastating as it is, but fast food will always be incapacitating. People forget how to fend for themselves and lose a sense of their own physical environment, even their own bodies.

“Animals eat; only man dines,” said the cooknook author Isabella Beeton. What we eat makes us who we are:

The nation which knows how to dine has learnt the leading lesson of progress. It implies both the will and the skill to reduce to order, and surround with idealisms and graces, the more material conditions of human existence; and wherever that will and skill exist, life cannot be wholly ignoble. 

                                   — Comments —

Aaron Traas writes:

I’d like to join the dissenters on this. I think people from outside of the NY metro area, and people that have never been to Italy have a bit of a skewed idea of what pizza really is, and no understanding about what it can be. If you identify pizza with what is available in most of North America, then you are correct under your definition. But that definition is extremely limiting and ignorant; akin to comparing Taco Bell to actual Mexican cuisine.

I can say as a lifetime resident of New Jersey and a man of Italian descent that there is a lot of poor pizza out there that barely registers as food. True pizza, however, is a truly sublime thing. At
its core, it’s a rustic bread made of a very wet dough. My favorite pizza comes from a restaurant that specializes in not only pizza and other breads, but also typical and traditional Tuscan and Neapolitan food. Their dough is made with locally cultured yeast poolish, and it is allowed to ferment for about 2 days before baked, which allows it to develop a truly complex flavor and character, comparable to some pies I’ve had in Umbria. Their most popular pie — the Margherita — is made with a very simple uncooked sauce, fresh basil grown in the back, and mozzerella that is made daily in this establishment, sometimes minutes before the pie is made. It is baked in a traditional wood-fired brick oven, and develops a smokey char on the edges of the crust. The crust is light, airy, chewy, smokey, and yeasty, topped with naturally sweet tomatos, basil, and olive oil, and amazingly soft, runny, milky mozzarella. It’s a sublime experience eating it fresh from the oven, and the freshness is so important, the establishment will not allow you to order this pie take-out, as they claim that it is marred in transit. The pizza here is truly a work of art.

Pizza, properly, is also eaten as only part of the meal. My family, both in Italy and in the US, very frequently have pizza as one of a number of dishes during the main course. It’s typically served with
salad, a meat dish or fish, one or more cooked vegetables, etc. It’s generally served in place of bread if the meat dish has no tomato sauce.

To claim that pizza cannot be high cuisine proper flies in the face of the history of the Margherita pie — its very name comes from a pie made in 1889 specially for Queen Margherita of Savoy in Naples.

I suspect that if I ever left Jersey, I’d have to build my own brick oven, and start to cultivate bread yeasts (I already do so for beer).

Laura writes:

I hope to someday teach a college-level course titled “Pizza and Culture.” It will examine the interstitial, contextual convergences of pizza and humanity. But until then I only have this humble blog.

From the very beginning of my discussions of this subject, I exempted artisanal and homemade pizza from my formal definition of modern pizza as industrial-grade intestinal stuffing. While commercial pizza is the Fix-a-Flat of foodstuffs, authentic Italian bread, as I previously stated,  is possibly the greatest category of edibles in the history of the world. That includes authentic pizza. Please sit up in your chair and pay attention!

I highly recommend that you install a brick oven in your dwelling to make some yourself. I enjoy making pizza and I would bet that even though I have no brick oven, my pizza is as good as, or better, than the one made with aged poolish that you buy. The problem with some artisanal pizza is that it seems to encourage cult-like, obsessive behavior. I may have to teach another course, entitled “Pizza and the Eschaton.” It would examine the theological, oracular substratum of this brick oven, wood-fired mysticism and the redemptive possibilities of charred crust. 

Jenny writes:

Pizza was such a treat for me growing up in the 1980s. Living on a farm meant delivery wasn’t possible, but maybe three times in my childhood, Daddy went to town and brought us back a pizza. It really was a treat. My mother would make homemade pizza every once in a while and that was a treat, too. Like the English commenter, anything other than boiled vegetables and baked meat was welcomed by us. Now that I manage my own home, homemade pizza is a regular feature on our monthly menu. I make it at least once a month and we all love it. It’s inexpensive and satisfying and goes very nicely with a big salad. In the summer we don’t have it as much because heating the oven so high isn’t prudent in the heat of summer; but on a cooler than usual day, I’ll make one.

I’ve managed to spoil my family with homemade pizza. In the two grocery stores in my town, there is an entire one side of an aisle filled with pizza and its relatives the pizza rolls and pizza bites. While we aren’t fans of frozen here, I certainly do understand how the mother who works outside of the home could come to love it.

Laura writes:

When I was a child, my mother occasionally made pizza with the store-bought Appian Way pizza kits. She was a very good cook, but these pizzas made with prefab crust and sauce were terrible.

Scott H. writes:

I thought I’d pass on this website, The English Kitchen. She says in her intro that she is “debunking the myths of English Cookery one recipe at a time.” I grew up in an English-speaking household here in the U.S. and I’ll put up my mom’s cooking against anything from the non-English speaking lands. You say: “Pizza as we know it represents the death of civilization. Fast food is spiritual starvation.” I would add Mexican food to that statement. The stuff they crank out in the fast food places is, as a host from Top Gear put it, “sick on a plate with cheese on top”…

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