Yes, I did it: I have eaten the pizza of the dystopian future so you don't have to.

The last couple of weeks, there’s been a lot of travel in my life. Let’s not bother to discuss the reasons why, other than to say that, at one point, Las Vegas and the world’s largest pizza trade show were involved.
 
And as twisted a place as Las Vegas can seem, I’ve been to a much weirder and more wronger place: the pizza vending machine at the far end of Atlanta’s Hartsfield Jackson International Airport Concourse D.
 
It is not quite the restaurant at the end of the universe. Nor was it the destination.
 
It was blind luck.
 
And it confirms my belief that our culture is either losing the war against the machines, or else going down a wormhole of collective madness. Nothing could better explain the experience. Not with optimism, anyway.

It was the last leg of my non-military extraction from New Jersey by Delta Airlines.
 
And oddly, during my week within the territory of the Interplanetary Pizza Kingdom that is South Jersey, I’d had exactly one slice of pizza. It was a grandma pie from an ostensibly coal-fired pizza joint.
 
 
This is one of those joints where “coal fired” does not feel like a culinary mission.
 
Instead, the coal fire feels like a marketing decision.
 
There’s nothing about the pizza that makes you think, “Heeeeeyyy, New Haaaaven!” Or even Lombardi’s before they lost The Oven. 
 
This was my first taste of the coal-fired joint’s grandma pie, and it was like an elevated sheet-pan pizza from a high-school cafeteria.
 
I was able to give it a little jazz hands with some post-purchase pro-tip treatment in the toaster oven. And it was OK.
 
A solid C-plus with the caveat that it was a delivery slice. When I was done giving it the makeover via toaster oven, I was glad to have tried it. I would still like to try it live inside the joint.
 
But I digress.
 
 
This grandma slice was not the pizza of the dystopian future viewed through the time-travel portal at ATL.
 
Rules of engagement in Concourse D at Hartsfield-Jackson are operating under the space-time continuum bylaws of perma-construction.
 
No matter how much construction gets finished, it seems there’s always mysterious new construction to take its place. It’s like schlepping your carryon through an Escher drawing of endless airport concourse makeovers.
 
As we made our way to the deepest, darkest reaches of D to The Last Jetway on Planet Earth, we passed it: a giant video screen on the front of a vending machine that was playing the comestibles porn of the Food Network Age.
 
Deep inside the bland atmosphere of a nondescript concourse hallway, there was the sudden, animated vision of giant, lurid, high-def and up-close sexy shots of pizza bubbling inside live fire, sizzling meats and cheeses and sauces beneath delicate fingers of flame caressing the crusts of impossibly appealing pizza pies, all of it beckoning passerby with their come-hither siren song of mile-high pizza pie to go.
 
 
We saw the pizza vending machine and laughed mightily.
 
All the rest of the way to our gate, in fact.
 
My ever tolerant pizza-widow wife, the Fabulous Honey Parker (a bestselling comic novelist and the Executive Producer on my Little Miss Margherita pizza documentary project) knew exactly what was going to happen when we dropped our bags in front of the ultimate gate to the jetway at the cusp of all that is holy in the vast habitrail of the globe’s busiest airport by passenger meandering.
 
My duffel had barely plunked down on the industrial carpet when I said it.

“I’ll be right back.”
 
 
I walked the 150 feet back to the pizza-shaped rip in the space-time continuum to once again view the vivid and enticing pizza porn of tomorrow.
 
Pizzas. Flames. Peels manipulating the pizzas beneath the flames. Silent. No audio. Just a hyperactive vision of what could be cavorting within, all displayed upon a portrait-oriented 52-inch screen set into the front of a pizza dispensing device that looked less like a Star Trek replicator and more like a tarted-up set-piece from Rick Deckard’s brutalist apartment in the original Blade Runner.
 
By that measure, I am certainly less a pizza Picard than a low-rent rumpled Ford in this scenario. ("Half-baked Hamill" would be a better descriptor, but how many stupid sci-fi film word salads do we really require inside this hellscape? Let’s just get to the pizza.)
 
 
I snapped some photos and pretended I was thinking about it.
 
Then, issuing a heavy sigh of the inevitable, I produced my all-aluminum American Express weaponized ninja fighting card and swapped digits with the machine for a 12-dollar cheese pizza measuring 7 inches.

I almost always order the cheese pizza on the first visit to a new joint because it's the most revealing result of the pizzamaker's craft. The cheese pizza offers the maker nowhere to hide. 
 
During the process, the machine was good enough to show a countdown clock as my pizza was being prepared. Baked fresh, perhaps? One can only hope.

ABOVE: The Pizza Vending Machine of Tomorrow counting down the time until my pizza is delivered hot and ready for love.


As the onscreen clock ticks down, the looped video of prurient pizza titillation continues delivering its mobius strip of infinite enticements until the numbers finally hit zero and the screen displays one word.
 
“Delivering…”
 
The ellipsis is animated, its three dots pulsing so you know the machine is not suddenly unstuck in time but is truly committed to pushing a pizza out of the slot in its face.

ABOVE: The anticipation of "Delivering..." goes on long enough that you have to wonder: will you need to unplug the machine and plug it back in?


​I watched those flashing dots long enough that I began to wonder how often they’re required to unplug the pizza machine and plug it back in again.
 
But we did not require a reboot.
 
Instead, the little Ridley Scott door in the front of the machine popped open with an angry hiss.
 
It pushed out a pizza box with the lid open.
 
I looked at the misshapen square of food-related fabrication sitting in the slot.
 
I thought, “Voyage of the pizza damned.”
 
Then I grabbed it and became aware of the butt-blistering potential.

​ABOVE: The pizza on the left is the kind of pizza being advertised on the machine that delivers the pizza on the right. Pepperoni aside, one of these things is not like the other. 


One thing is certain: the pizza of the future is so ripping hot that a careless individual will quickly require plastic surgery.
 
This baby will take off even your fingerprints faster than a belt sander running 60-grit. Don’t accidently flap any of this pizza down onto your chin.
 
Could they also dispense cosmetic surgery from a vending machine? Talk about a profitable line extension.
 
Anyway, I looked at the pizza.
 
There were some points of promise.
 
A bit of char.
 
Some tiny bubbles.

ABOVE: The Pizza of Tomorrow as delivered by the machine. Mainly. (The bites are my own. It came out of the machine whole.)


But largely, it looked unhappy.
 
As I walked back to the gate, I picked the pizza out of the box to take a bite.
 
The best thing I can say about it has already been said: it was as hot as Chuck Norris on the sun.
 
The pizza was also floppy like a damp washcloth.
 
There was very little sauce, just a thin coating as if dry-brushed on the canvas by a stingy watercolor artist.
 
There were a few clots of a coagulated, white, rubbery substance that may once have been cheese but was now evocative of a Salvadore Dali painting that might be called Persistence of Visionary Garlic Cloves Melting Across Mars.
 
The undercarriage carried a promise of flavorful potential. There was texture and color and char, oh my.

ABOVE: The undercarriage. An optimist might view this as a hopeful sign. A pessimist would be at a different vending machine. 


It was a promise unfulfilled.
 
The predominant flavor profile was under-seasoned Kraft paper with a half-baked veneer of insipid hues.
 
If our supermarket produce sections in America specialize in selling us the veritable idea of tomato, this pizza machine of tomorrow specializes in selling us a half-baked promise of last-week's pizza.
 
And when your expectations are already so low that you can’t imagine being disappointed, it takes a special effort to dash a hope so meager.
 
As a bonus feature, the pizzas on the vending portal's giant screen were round, but the pizza that came out of the box was square.
 
I held it up for Honey to see.
 
It flopped over like a gourmet washrag.

ABOVE: The Pizza of Tomorrow in all its dopamine-inducing gourmet glory. 


I told her she should have a bite.

She said, "No thanks."

I said, “You need to know.”
 
Reluctant, she took the pizza-like object from my hand and had a taste.
 
She looked at me and said, “Why did you do that to me?”
 
The pizza of the dystopian future is a 12-dollar disappointment of such a degree that I can’t even begin to understand beyond believing one thing: This is a mistake.
 
 
It must be the product of a mechanism malfunction.
 
My pizza was the result of production failure in the moment. 

I hope. 

If it was not, if this is the way it was supposed to be, the reality is far worse.
 
It means millions of dollars in research and development and marketing and logistics shepherded by hundreds of humans have all come together in this misbegotten mess of a meal substitute that tastes like a disappointment so harrowing, it could be rendered in a Rodin sculpture of an epic tragedy all covered in bird droppings that are impervious to the rain in which it stands and of which there are biblical amounts.
 
(Dennis Miller, eat your heart out.* It’ll taste better than this pizza.)
 
Moreover, when I stood there in front of the machine, watching the voluptuous porn pizzas being manipulated beneath the flames of corporate marketing—and the machine then delivered a square pizza—I was philosophical.
 
 
I thought, As disappointing as the shape may be, at least the square is about 20% larger than the circle.
 
Well, even that hope doesn’t float.
 
There’s no reason to endure an additional 20% of this misery delivered with the promise about a simple joy of which this product is utterly vacant.
 
Who would ever think that vending machine pizza is going to be great?
 
Nobody. Any expectations of the pizza are the product of a willingness to compromise mightily.
 
Crushing those already compromised hopes for a tiny rush of dopamine while enduring The Doomtown Of The Air Travel Herd Animals is an emotional bridge too far.
 
 
I pray this is a failure on the part of the machine to perform as programmed.
 
Because if it’s not, it means something dire.
 
Somewhere, somehow, some people have done their collective best, and this is the unworthy result.
 
A purposeful evil committed in an effort to cash in without conscience.
 
Or maybe it’s just a collective denial and insanity. The subjects are cheering the cut of the emperor's new pizza clothes. 
 
Either way, I hate to believe this is a pizza for our time.


Want pizza for the road?
 
Make pizza at home.

Let it cool.

Pack it to travel.

It would be a far, far better thing--even served at room temp. 
 
Reclaim the power and free the pizza.
 
At least for a moment, it’ll make you happy like you can’t imagine.


*Comedian Dennis Miller is known for his long and rambling esoteric references. I have been known try and out-Jabba the Hutt. So to speak.
 
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