The onslaught continues. I can’t remember the last time I had pizza at the cafeteria but it’s nonetheless still a staple of my diet.

Last night there was a little hitch, though. Whoever ordered the pizza seemed to do it with stunning disregard for what kind of pizza people might want to eat. Typically when ordering pizza for a group, you get some variation of four major kinds (cheese, pepperoni, sausage, Canadian bacon) with maybe something more exotic thrown in there for people that want something a little bit different. Tonight’s collection had something like 10 pizzas with exactly one of the above four staples and nine of the exotic kinds.

The pepperoni was gone within ten minutes and the rest had not more than a piece or two taken out. Now I do sometimes like variety. In fact, except when my options are limited I’ve stopped eating tomato-sauce pizza almost altogether. When my wife and I order pizza, we almost always order pesto sauce. I’ve also somewhat reluctantly come to like BBQ sauced pizza (in small quantities) and always love Alfredo sauced pizza. I’ve never been big on tomatoes anyway and while I tolerate the sauce, it’s the tribute to all the cheese that I get with the pizza.

There was one type of exotic pizza in the line that I did eat. It had artichokes, onions, and feta cheese on it and it was pretty good. I’m not entirely an unadventurous eater. I’ll really try just about anything once. The thing is that I have to know what it is. The pizza we got last night was full of stuff that I couldn’t identify and that’s about the worst kind of stuff that there is! I did give one new kind a try that didn’t look like it had anything too exotic, but it had something in lieu of the tomato sauce was so dreadful that I threw away my first piece of pizza in living memory.

It’s hard not to realize what a prick I am for complaining about free food, but I never claimed not to be a prick.


Category: Kitchen

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7 Responses to Pizza, Pizza II: Pizza Xenophobia

  1. Becky says:

    My company does a monthly lunch for us and I’d say that it’s pizza at least every other month (which is just okay to begin with), but like what you described, they order more exotic styles than the staples. I’m kind of a picky eater, so I usually don’t even get any by the time I arrive since the one pepperoni goes so quickly. It’s strange that they take our orders for other things, like sandwich boxes, but they don’t ask our input on the pizza flavors.

  2. Peter says:

    My favorite ‘za is just the plain cheese and sauce variety. If I’m going to have a topping, I’ll go for ‘shrooms, not any meat toppings.

  3. ecco says:

    Sorry, but I don’t understand how you like spam, and are then afraid of exotic pizza. Also, you’ll probably like spam musubi (sp?) which is similar to spam sushi.

  4. trumwill says:

    It’s strange that they take our orders for other things, like sandwich boxes, but they don’t ask our input on the pizza flavors.

    I’d always thought that one of the reasons that pizza is so popular as a company-provided meal is that you don’t have to take orders. That requires, however, ordering styles of pizza that are remotely popular.

  5. trumwill says:

    Peter,

    I don’t understand how you can not like on pizza. That’s strange to me. I like cheese pizza well enough, but more because it doesn’t have things I don’t like rather than because I prefer it that way.

  6. trumwill says:

    Ecco,

    I have always had an affinity for low-class cuisines. Spam is a relatively recent indulgence, but I used to eat hot dogs at convenience stores with regularity until I had a very, very, very unfortunate experience doing that. I think my mind associates exotic pizza with high-class and foreign cuisines that my meat-n-tater(-n-spice!) mouth is more skeptical about in part because they’re richer in vegetables.

  7. Peter says:

    I find that most meat toppings on pizza, especially pepperoni, make it too oily.

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