- Cape Rolling Out Bloomfield Road Art Trail (8/21/19)1
- Donors Pledge Almost Two Grand To Replace SEMO's Possibly Sentient ‘Gum Tree' (8/16/18)
- SEMO and The Will To (Become A Consultant) – Part 2 (6/14/18)
- SEMO and The Will To Do (You Really Want To See That Legal Notice?) – Part 1 (6/4/18)
- Judge, Jury... Trashman (6/1/18)
- Diary of Cape Girardeau Road Deconstruction (5/11/18)
- Trying To Save A Tree From City “Improvements” (4/30/18)2
So Where Does That Pepperoni Come From?
I was craving a pizza the other evening.
My wife was out of town on a business trip so I was batching it. I had taken the day off from work to make some progress on renovating the last 6 sets of windows from my front porch and I wanted some pie, some pizza pie.
Renovating these windows has been a fairly grueling affair and I've tackled the project in spurts. Basically it has involved stripping the windows down to the bare wood, making any needed repairs then re-glazing each pair's 20 panes of glass before applying a fresh coat of primer and paint.
The eight sets of windows I've done so far look like new -- there were a total of 14 -- but it's tedious work and standing on concrete for hours can make for an achy back.
So I wanted a pizza to celebrate my progress.
I considered ordering one, but since we were out of orange juice I figured I would just dash over to Schnuck's and kill two birds with one stone. The OJ was a quick buy, but the pizza took a little longer.
Did I want the California Pizza Kitchen BBQ Chicken pizza which is pretty good, but definitely not as tasty as eating it in one of their actual restaurants or did I want one of those thick crust pizzas that take nearly a half-hour to bake or did I want a nice, quick-to-cook Tony's pizza that I often consumed when I was still a bachelor?
Tony's won out of sentimental reasons and I took a pepperoni pie home with me for a quick bake and a quicker devouring.
While the oven was heating up, I noticed on the front of the box that my pizza was topped with "Pepperoni Made With Pork, Chicken and Beef."
While I have eaten pepperoni pizza for years, I've never considered where the heck the meat came from. I certainly never thought it came from a pig, a chicken and a cow. Reading that on the box sort of reminded me of that odd Thanksgiving entrée, the turducken, which is a duck stuffed inside a chicken that is then stuffed inside a turkey.
Could the pepperoni on my pizza be the result of a cowpigen -- a chicken stuffed inside a pig which is then stuffed inside a cow? And how long would it take to cook something that huge? Days I imagine.
But then reality sunk in. I realized that this innocuous sounding marketing spin was a veiled way of saying that all of the marginal parts of slaughtered cows, pigs and chickens were shipped to a sausage maker who ground them all up and made pepperoni for the pie I was getting ready to nosh on.
Yum.
In junior high I read the book "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair. It documented the deplorable conditions in the Chicago meatpacking industry around 1905. After reading the vivid and often disgusting descriptions in that book, I briefly became a vegetarian. Of course after a week of Pop Tarts and salad, I pushed the book's descriptions from the forefront of my mind and found a hamburger to devour.
Now that I'm older, details like those penned by Upton Sinclair and the thought of the possible existence of a cowpigen still stifle my appetite, just not for a week.
More like the 11 to 13 minutes it takes to actually bake the pizza.
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My Google Search Results increased by 270 this week to 1970.
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