Pizza, Not Politics: The Case for Ever More Bread & Circus

​Here at Free The Pizza, we are dedicated to the idea of making great pizza whenever you want with the oven you already have. It’s kind of a pizza liberation movement, freeing you from the tyranny of takeout or investing in tiny, cruel ovens. Sometimes, we’re offering newbie advice. Other times, we’re ranting on the state of pizza as we know it. Here and there, a possibly apocryphal history lesson. And once in a while, we’re digressing into a wild space having little to do with pizza.
 
For instance, today was going to be a joyous screed about my brand new pizza shoes. Really. Special new shoes for making pizza. (But I’m still using my old pizza helmet.) Then, after sledding downhill on the routine wildcat excitement of this morning’s scintillating news headlines, we at Free The Pizza have a new goal: We want to be part of the Bread & Circuses of our time.

Hello, Department Of Pizza Entertainment (DOPE). Who wouldn’t want to be hip-deep in the splendid misdirection of The American Comedy right now? There’s so much madcap mishigas we get to enjoy each day. Look at tariffs, for instance. My grocery bill is suddenly through the roof. Why? One word: preparedness!
 
It’s no mystery that flour is an important part of life here at the Free The Pizza Fortezza Di Pane E Formaggio. (That’s “Fortress Of Bread And Cheese,” for all you non-Italian speakers from the Greek island of Xenophobia.) Pizza is all about the proverbial Staff Of Life manipulated and enhanced for our dopamine-induced pleasure. Take a piece of bread, augment it with cheese and tomatoes, take a taste, and your brain gets a wild ride on the chemical-messenger railroad of reward and motivation.
 
But it’s all gonna get more expensive. Never mind the fact that a lot of US flour is made from imported Canadian wheat. I doubt that any of the flour I use is milled from anything but 110% tough American wheat with a red, white and blue endosperm.

But I’m taking no chances. I want plenty of flour and I want it at today's lower prices. That's why a big box truck from the big box store rolled up yesterday and dumped a pallet of flour in my driveway—both bread flour and all-purpose. I’ve also put in a few sacks of dark rye and whole wheat because man cannot live by white flour alone. Frequently there must be a self-deceptive token nod to high-fiber whole grains.
 
SIDEBAR: In case you don’t know, dark rye flour has about 300% more fiber than all-purpose. And whole wheat has about 600% more. That's so rich in fiber you can reduce cholesterol and induce a great, big, unholy answer to nature’s call just by reading this paragraph!
 
I’m also building a wall. And no, Mexico is not paying for it. I am. This wall is built of 100% US-grown tomatoes-in-a-can stacked in my pantry. No imported Italian DOP product for DOPE here, no sirree Bob.

Granted, my wall of canned tomatoes is making it very hard to find anything else in our tiny pantry. But we’ll sort that out later when we're forced to get in there and dig out our backstock of dried emergency foodstuffs during hurricane season when we don’t know enough to evacuate because NOAA’s emergency weather intel for us Gulf Staters was rightfully eliminated as government waste. 
 
But I digress. And I apologize if that last thought seems a borderline transgression against Free The Pizza’s bumper-sticker ethos of Pizza, Not Politics. We have always believed that if you sit everyone down around a gigantic pepperoni pizza, it would be much easier to get along.
 
Of course, we still need to address the cheese portion of the equation here. We’ve been told by our commander in chief of his great love for the American farmer. He has also said very pointedly that in the short term, it’s going to get more difficult for the American farmer. I presume that to include not only wheat farmers and tomato farmers, but factory dairy farmers. That would result in yet another price-increase situation for my beloved low-moisture whole-milk mozzarella.
 
Great news: low-moisture mozzarella freezes really well. In our house, we don’t freeze much of anything beyond leftovers and the occasional stray body part, so we have room in the freezer. And as long as we have room enough for the rocks that go in our bourbon (which I’ll bet is right now on the way to being bargain-priced due to excess inventory resulting from Canada’s big middle-finger flip in the form of a boycott against imported American booze), we can easily put in enough bricks of cheese to keep us in pizza for a year, no problem-o.
 
Apropos of nothing, I was suddenly thinking about how the California Cheese Board likes to remind us that "Great cheese comes from happy cows." My brand of mozzarella does not appear to originate from California. I wonder if it comes from unhappy cows. And does that result in unhappy cheese? And does it leave the pizza morose, wilting beneath a dimly glowing halo of sadness? Mmmm…probably not.
 
Based on personal experience, even if it is unhappy cheese, it still provides the very happy and addictive dopamine rush of what’s been called “dairy crack.” That tidbit comes from at least one healthcare professional who calls for government regulation of cheese—which is, of course, never going to happen. It's not in the budget. And thank God.

Imagine being brought up on charges of exceeding your government-imposed dairy-crack quota. “But your honor, I needed a pizza!” is an excuse that will never hold up in court. And who wants to be driven out of the sunshine and into an underground contraband string-cheese gallery, where everyone's paying exorbitant street prices for their dairy crack fix? 
 
So, anyway, I think we wandered away from the main point, so let's not be distracted and wander back. We’ve got all the flour, cheese and tomatoes required to fuel the bready side of Bread & Circuses. (Or maybe we call it Pizza & Circuses?) Perhaps by next week we can determine how to circus-ize Free The Pizza to get us all the way onboard with the full-on DOPE (Department Of Pizza Entertainment) program for pulling the wool over our own eyes.

And if none of this has made any sense to you, that's good. Welcome to the distraction machine. Unhinged nonsense is just one goal of many. 
 
Until then, remember: Pizza, Not Politics! And a pox on anyone who pollutes the pizza circus by politicizing it. (It has happened, and I just don’t understand what’s wrong with people.) Just be DOPE!

Brought to you by the Department Of Pizza Entertainment. Apologies to the great Decimus Junius Juvenalis (who goes by the nom de plume Juvenal and the rapper name Juvie) for corrupting his concept of panem et cercenses for entertainment purposes only and for not doing anything even remotely approaching my civic duty.