In Praise of Pepperoni Pizza

Photo from Flickr!

Quick – finish this sentence: As American as ____

You said apple pie, right? But what if I said you couldn’t say apple. Try again:

As American as ____

Did you say pepperoni pizza? Maybe you did, maybe you didn’t. But here’s the point: if you did say “pepperoni pizza”, no one would bat an eye. Because along with baseball and Coca-Cola, apple pie and cheeseburgers, few things are as – dare I say it – authentically American as pepperoni pizza.

But when it comes to the traditions of invented nostalgia and conspicuous scarcity that characterize the growing, and increasingly odious, food-tailoring movement known as “artisanal”, the unpretentiously popular pepperoni pizza is disturbingly mass-market.

The fun thing about the foodie craze is watching the inexorable ratchet of obnoxiousness. A decade ago, the organic folks were relatively harmless hippies and granola munchers who would natter at parties about pesticide use. Then five years ago the locavores arrived and turned the distance their salad traveled to their plate into a painfully earnest moral crusade. And now the artisanal movement is busy turning the every day act of feeding oneself into parody of performative gamesmanship that Stephen Potter would have loved.

Naively, I thought they would have left our pizza alone. But nooo. As the NYT reports today, “atisanal pizza joints are opening across the United States”. And if the idea of an artisanal pizza joint makes about as much sense as, I dunno,  “Heritage Doctor Pepper”, think again:

In these rarefied, wood-fired precincts, pizzas are draped with hot soppressata and salami piccante, and spicy pizza alla diavola is popular. At Boot and Shoe Service in Oakland, Calif., there is local-leek-and-potato pizza. At Paulie Gee’s in Brooklyn, dried cherry and orange blossom honey pizza. At Motorino in the East Village, brussels sprouts and pancetta.

But pepperoni pizza? No way. After all, pepperoni isn’t Italian, it’s American. And as Michael Ruhlman, an “expert in meat curing” (and, it transpires, total douchebag) puts it, pepperoni pizza is “a distorted reflection of a wholesome tradition”. Distorted how? By the act of selling it to someone other than smarmy stockbrokers and over-botoxed ladies who lunch, of course:

“Bread, cheese and salami is a good idea,” he said. “But America has a way of taking a good idea, mass-producing it to the point of profound mediocrity, then losing our sense of where the idea comes from.” He prefers lardo or a fine-grained salami, very thinly sliced, then laid over pizza as it comes out of the oven rather than cooked in the oven.

You know what I prefer? Normal, mediocre, pepperoni pizza. The kind you grab for $1.99 a slice at some hole in the wall on the street as you walk by on the way to meet a friend for a movie. Or that you jam into your mouth at 2:30am after a night of drinking, trying to get enough fat and carbs into your system that you don't collapse. I don't care if it's thick crust or thin crust. I don't care if the cheese is on top of the pepperoni or below it. I don't care if the pepperoni curls or lies flat. I really don't care about any of that, because eating pepperoni pizza isn't an experience, it is something you do that enables other experiences, like sitting around watching the NHL playoffs with some friends or fueling up for a late night of work or study. This is food as function, at its most prosaically and harmlessly moral.

The search for authenticity, especially when it comes at the intersection of food and nationalism, is beset by all manner of absurdities. At worst, the latent xenophobia and intolerance embedded in the very idea of “authentic culture” becomes explicit, as in the case of the Hamilton Farmers’ Market.  But more often, those tendencies reveal themselves through pretension and elitism disguised as a progressive respect for folk tradition and anti-consumerism.

There’s probably not much to be done about it, given human nature and the deep, self-hating anti-consumerist strain in Western culture.

But I really thought they’d leave our pizza alone.