Flowers on pizza: crazy good eye candy, or a decadent harbinger for our twisted times?

I’ve been looking at a photo of a remarkable pizza on the cover of a big, national pizza-trade journal.
 
The pizza is captivating. It is artful. It is effortless in its beauty. 
 
The rim of the crust is crazily blistered with golden bubbles of delight.
 
The pizza is resplendent with tiny tomatoes, prosciutto, mushrooms and micro greens.

And the single most stupefyingly joy-inducing part of this pizza's appearance?
 
Flowers. 

They are tiny notes of glory punctuating the pizza with yellow, violet, white, purple, lavender, the palest of blue, even the orange of an Aperol spritz on a sunny day.

(This is not a how-to article on edible flowers. But at the bottom of the page is a link for more info on using flowers. In fact, save yourself from the madness to come. Just scroll down there now.)
 
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I’ve jokingly referred to pizza as discs of joy.
 
This particular disc brings the joy in a new dimension and makes you wonder if it’s too beautiful to eat.
 
The problem from a rational perspective? 
 
As gorgeous as they are, the problem is the flowers.
 
I don’t know if you’ve ever eaten flowers. I have.
 
Not as a steady diet.
 
But as a pizza topping.
 
And in salad.
 
 
What do they taste like, you ask?
 
I don’t know.
 
But they look fantastic.
 
We are clearly wired to be seduced by the beauty of flowers.
 
But the taste is…
 
Subtle. Fresh air with a slight pillowy texture. Baby's breath, maybe. Perhaps a hint of gossamer. 
 
 
A cynic would call it flavorless.
 
I was talking with the Fabulous Honey Parker, comedy vampire novelist about this.
 
I held up the photo of the glorious pizza covered in what looks like casual castoffs from the Royal Horticultural Society.

I said, “I’m thinking that this could be in a class with gold leaf on pizza.
 
“It doesn’t taste like anything. There’s no nutritional value. It’s all there for looks.”
 
She understood.
 
 
But at least flowers are a sustainable resource.
 
Gold, by its very definition as a precious metal, is unsustainable. There’s a finite supply. It’s expensive to obtain, and difficult to keep. 
 
And on a pizza, gold is just firing for effect.
 
Personally, I find the gold on pizza to be unattractive. It doesn’t look right. It looks out of place.

It belongs not on pizza but in my portfolio, and on the ring in my nose. Inorganics on parade.
 
 
But this pizza with the flowers?
 
It's ironic that the crust is radiant and golden. You can’t get more organic. The pizza looks like something Monet might have painted if he had been blessed with 20/20 vision and a sunrise in the garden.
 
The first such pizza to cross my path was a photo from the very famous Lovely’s Fifty-Fifty in Portland, Oregon.
 
Founder and chef Sarah Minnick has a degree in fine arts from RISD. It seems unsurprising that she could create a pizza that is gallery-worthy.
 
You hear the woman in conversations on pizza podcasts, and you think, “I want to have her at the next party. What a joy.”

There's that J-word again.
 
 
Let’s contrast this with the decadence of a gold-leaf pizza.
 
The first time it flew across my radar like a UFO of gilded pizza madness, it was a stunt pizza from a place in NYC.
 
Besides the gold leaf, there was foie gras, truffles, probably angel wings (they’re good for pizzeria margin), uncut gems, lark’s tongue, and the breath of a wombat.
 
OK. Perhaps I exaggerate.
 
But I know that, among other rare, luxury-shop toppings, the gold leaf, foie gras, and truffles were part of it.
 
 
The pizza cost $2,000.
 
It also had to be ordered in advance. Two days.
 
You cannot DoorDash the $2,000 pizza with gold leaf and lark‘s tongue.
 
But it was so insidious. It still sticks in my craw.
 
It’s just showing off: “Look at me! I’m gold! I’m expensive!”
 
As opposed to the pizza with flowers: “Look at me! I’m colorful! Feel the joy!”
 
The gold on the pizza suggests, Eat me because I’m decadent and in the end I’m just coming out the other end. I have zero nutrition.
 
The flowers on the pizza suggests, Let’s get busy! Eat me and propagate! Let’s be fruitful and multiply!
 
 
The flower pizza is optimistic with a promise of a Kodachrome tomorrow.
 
The gold leaf pizza is crass.
 
It promises a grainy, black-and-white tomorrow with Dutch angles and oblique shadows. Some guy in a fedora is lurking around the corner.
 
The gold leaf on the pizza is void of nourishment and promises money spent foolishly.
 
It seems an empty gesture of decadent folly.
 
 
We casually throw around the word “Decadent.”
 
We’ve appropriated it as a luxury descriptor for things like quadruple-fudge brownies laced with essence of cartoon Satan.
 
Did you know that decadence was an actual movement? 
 
And no, not like the one from gold leaf. Though some may beg to differ.
 
Wikipedially speaking, the Decadence movement came about in the late 19th century. It parallelled the Gilded Age. (How's that for irony?)
 
It apparently emphasized “a need for sensationalism, egocentricity, and bizarre, artificial, perverse, and exotic sensations and experiences.”
 
 
Sounds like the downtown Manhattan club scene of the 1980s.
 
The word “decadence” is also used to refer to “a decline in art, literature, science, technology, and work ethic.”
 
(Why am I imagining a Day-Glo painting of dogs playing poker on velvet while Claude repaints the Mona Lisa for your amusement and an AI voice reads aloud from Pride and Prejudice and Zombies?)
 
Loosely speaking, the word “decadent” is a description of self-indulgent behavior. See also: that previous parenthetical about the dogs et al.
 
Clearly, I have little sprinkles of bargain-basement decadence speckled about my own character like bits of char on a pizza from Bianco.
 
See also: my own pizza creations topped with gumbo, étouffée, crawfish, shrimp, alligator sausage, too much garlic, and hog jowl. (No, not all at once. Even I have limits.)
 
All of that freaks out some people. I wonder what they'd do if I put gold leaf on the alligator sausage. 
 
 
But at the end of all this, I don’t know what any of it means.
 
Other than the soulless use of gold for gold’s sake—a product of technological advancement, an engine of human suffering, and a magnet for the romantic and the royal, the venal and the violent—it’s maybe an insult to the pizza, and by extension, the pizza lover.
 
The flowers? They’re inexpensive and unexpected. They bring joy. They're kind of a Crazy Ivan peeking around the corner and giggling.
 
Ultimately, all of it is for effect. But one of these effects is different than the other.
 
Enjoy your joy on pizza, whatever it is. Even if it’s pineapple and lark’s tongues.
 
And by the way, my wife just told me to tell you she’s left the building to go light her cigar with a $100 bill and complain about waste for show. 

If you'd like to know more about putting flowers on your own pizza, click here. 

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