Our Fearless Leader is good to us — in so many ways. For our Wednesday lunchtime editorial meetings, Dave (Warner, Editor) has pizza delivered from Gourmet Pizza Company. While, as someone who grew up in New Yoo-awk, I may be fairly discerning about my pizza, FREE pizza is always good (except for Pizza Hut, which I will not eat under any non-starvation circumstances). Which brings me to real topic of this entry: pizza crust. Specifically, whether to eat it or not.
I do not. Every Pizza Wednesday, you'll find in front of me a paper plate with two or three hefty husks of bread, the uneaten crusts from my slices.
This bugs KelliK, who sits there and meticulously consumes her crust by slicing it into bitesize pieces with a KNIFE AND FORK. WTF? She actually had the gall last Wednesday to utter those infamous words, "The crust is the best part." How can the crust be the best part? It's a slab of doughy, tasteless bread that might as well be stamped "Feel Free to Discard Me." Why would anyone waste valuable stomach space with a lump of baked dough when they could reach for another sublime melding of sauce, cheese, toppings and bread? The crust's only value, as I see it, is as a handling tool. Without the crust, it would nigh impossible to pick up a slice and fold it in half NY-style.
OK, there's at least one exception to my discard-the-crust approach, and that's when there's barely enough pie to go around, and reaching for that next slice might be seen as hogging. When pizza pickins are slim, I'll choke down the crust. Fortunately, we don't have that problem in our editorial meetings — like I said, Our Fearless Leader is good to us — so my crusts end up in the discard pile.
I know that this will offend the sensibilities of those who think wasting food is sinful, those who subcribe to the whole "They're starving in _______" thing. But what am I gonna do? FedEx my crusts to The Sudan?
Certainly some of you will think that I'm a) way off base when it comes to the delicacy known as pizza crust or b) an idiot for wasting perfectly good "food." And to those of you, I say: I'll be glad to overnight you my crust. Just give me your FedEx #.
This article appears in Feb 22-28, 2006.