Pie another day

My father insists that pizza is a health food. “Pizza is a health food!” he says. Then I laugh at him.

Pizza is many things. It’s a marvel of geometry, a delicious feast and a great dinner choice when all you have left in the fridge are two cans of Diet Coke and a wedge of cheese. But that doesn’t make it a health food.

Which isn’t to say it’s totally without nutrition. The cheese has calcium, tomatoes contain lycopene, which helps to ward off diseases, and if the crust is made from whole wheat flour then there are grains and fibers galore, which makes your basic pizza nutritionally decent, if incomplete. Certainly there are worse things you could be eating, like just about anything found in the snack or cookie aisle of your local supermarket. As far as your health is concerned, the only thing worse than a sleeve of Oreos is a chocolate-coated cyanide tablet. Even then, at least the chocolate has antioxidants.

For each of its redeeming qualities, though, there’s something else that bumps pizza down a tick. Depending on toppings, a pizza can be loaded with saturated fat, calories and sodium, which is what those in the nutrition business call the “evil hat trick.” Actually, I’m making that up. But it has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? That would a be a great name for a metal band -- Evil Hat Trick. I”m going to take a break from my thesis for a second to congratulate myself on that one.

Ahhh. That felt good.

Anyway, pizza. It’s unfortunate that its effects on health are complicated at best, because the world would be a thousand times better if we could all just eat it at every meal, and occasionally for a snack. There’s a reason why establishments exist that specialize in pizza and pizza alone, and why most of those establishments deliver it straight to your door. Not a lot of foods have their own business model supporting them. There are no peanut butter and jelly shops, no boiled-chicken-and-broccoli restaurants, no mom-and-pop outfits exclusively serving up breakfast cereal. Even burger joints have to sell something besides burgers to maintain people’s interest -- chicken nuggets, plastic clowns, something. Not pizza. I could open a pizza place tomorrow that served plain cheese pies and nothing else, and there’d be an audience for it. Assuming the pies were good. Which they wouldn’t be, because everything I cook tends to taste like shoes. But still.

Overindulgence is the enemy of waistlines, and it’s hard not to overdo it with a food so delicious. The trick for me is to not let pizza become a weekly routine. It was, once. During my preteen years every Friday was the same: The family would order a couple of large pies and hunker down in front of the TV, munching silently as we watched Looney Tunes marathons on TNT. I was quite a bit larger back then. Pizza wasn’t the only culprit, but it didn’t help, and yet I still didn’t put two and two together, happy to nosh mindlessly while Daffy Duck got bonked on the noggin with an anvil as big as a grand piano. To this day I still associate cheese pizza with Bugs Bunny. I’m not sure what that means from a psychological standpoint, and frankly, I’d rather not find out.

In a way, being a child of the ’80s and ’90s helped to fuel my pizza fascination. Kids of that generation -- especially boys -- were obsessed with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a gang of four anthropomorphic reptiles who fought crime and could kick really high. We liked them ’cause they looked weird and killed a lot of robots. They were also party dudes who were obsessed with pizza, and since the boys in my class all wanted to be like them, we had to be pizza-obsessed party dudes, too. As a food it already lends itself to being a kids’ favorite, but the Turtles’ popularity kicked things into overdrive; everything was pizza, pizza, pizza. The NInja Turtles did more for pizza than the sitcom Cheers did for beer. Although frankly beer doesn’t need the help.

The Turtles were fond of loading up their pies with offbeat toppings, like flies and stinkbugs. Those haven’t crept into the American diet (yet), but that hasn’t stopped people from experimenting with all manner of oddities. “Gourmet” pizza restaurants cater to our strangest whims and cravings. I ordered a macaroni-and-cheese pizza once, mostly out of curiosity, and found it to be surprisingly edible, although it would have been nice if it had come with a complimentary angioplasty.

Macaroni and cheese is undoubtedly an offbeat topping, but that’s nothing compared to what’s found around the globe. Australians put kangaroo and crocodile meat on their pies. The French lather them with fried eggs. Brits top theirs off with haggis, Palestinians load them with pine nuts, and Swedes often opt for banana curry. A lot of those toppings sound gross -- you might as well put Skittles and strawberry jam on a pizza -- but they also, in their culturally unique and gag-reflex-triggering way, represent what’s so appealing about pizza. It’s customizable. No two are the same. You can put whatever you want on a pie. Marshmallows. Honey Nut Cheerios. Circus peanuts. Every steaming tray pulled from every oven is as unique as the individual ordering it, the ultimate representation of culinary diversity. No wonder it’s one of the world’s most popular foods. It can be everything to everyone.

Despite all that, it’s not a health food. It belongs in the same category as French fries and cheeseburgers, a treat that works best as an infrequent indulgence. Sorry, Dad. If you want to make healthy food choices, the NInja Turtle diet may not be the best way to go.