Peter’s Blog, June 14th

Welcome back everyone.

I mentioned in the Coming Attractions about how much I enjoyed the recent Jon Stewart rant about NY pizza.  I found it at: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-june-1-2011/me-lover-s-pizza-with-crazy-broad” —  but you can also track it down via a Google search under Jon Stewart Pizza (one of these days I’ll have to figure out out to put one of those click here buttons into these postings). Anyway, I’m sure most of you have already seen it and, aside from the many satirical levels on which it worked (let’s face it, all comics will lament the day when they don’t have either Sarah Palin or Donald Trump to use as foils — it’s as easy as shooting ducks on an Alaskan pond), I found Stewart’s rant especially insightful as a social commentary on how important pizza really is to us. In some ways, he did a better, or at least funnier version, of what fuels Pizza Quest–the deep passion and connection many of us feel — though clearly not The Donald — to pizza.

 So, yes, it was really funny –in some ways brilliant, albeit a bit profane (but hey, it’s about pizza, so we’ll cut him some slack!)– but more importantly, it reinforces what we’ve been saying here since Day One: there is something about pizza that touches us deeply, not just because it tastes good but because of what it represents.

So what does it represent?

Obviously, to Jon Stewart — and not just to him but to so many of us, which is why his rant was so brilliant– it is a trigger point, a symbol of cultural identity. In the instance of the rant,

pizza is a symbol of what it means to be from New York City, to be a nice Jewish kid from humble stock, as Stewart points out, who can one day aspire to be Robert DeNiro, or anyone else for that manner (don’t miss the snippet of his impersonation of Trump himself in the opening few seconds of the bit). So, one message was, “Hey, you mess with New York pizza and you mess with me.” But, obviously, it goes much deeper than that. We’ve discussed here how pizza has its many global incarnations; dough with something on it is not just an Italian invention, though the folks in Naples have come pretty darn close to perfecting what dough with something on it can artfully be. It’s a vehicle for delivering flavor–perhaps dough with something on it is the perfect flavor delivery system, whether it be as pizza, quesadilla, naan with garlic butter, or even a grilled cheese sandwich or a hoagie, cheesesteak (now you’re getting into Philly turf, so tread carefully) or any kind of sandwich–they’re all dough with something on it — or in it — and they all work as vehicles for delivering flavor. But, as the rant shows, they also deliver a sense of identity. Note my cautionary comment about cheesesteaks and hoagies, above, something as dear to we Philly folk as NY pizza is to a New Yorker, or a kielbasa is to someone from Detroit or Hamtramck, or a wiener is to someone from Wisconsin (don’t get started on wiener jokes–that ship has had its 15 minutes of fame this past week and has sailed off the ends of the earth, I hope), or a kolache is to someone of Czech or Polish background, and on and on–all signifiers of cultural identity. Don’t mess with them or you mess with the people who are connected to them. Of course we love pizza — it is not only the Italians, the New Yorkers, the New Havenites, the Chicago Deep Dishers, or even the Pizza Huttites–everyone, it seems, has a connection to pizza, a taste memory, a family or personal history with it, a relationship that began or ended or found solace over it; we all have our own personal connection with pizza.

So, and I’m preaching to the choir here, this is why why we’re on this journey, “on the bus,” individually and collectively; to dig a little deeper into that connection, to find out who and why we are the way we are, and to discover why some things can have this power in our lives, to help define us to ourselves, to provide touch points of meaning and meaningfulness. Think about this as you watch that rant again; there’s a lot going on — right up to the last punchline.