Pizza Worship

"Pizza worship has swept New York," a New York Times headline proclaimed recently.

"Pizza lovers", the Times announced, "have elevated their passion to a vocation, sending pizza into a whole new stratosphere of respect. It isn't just loved, and it isn't just devoured. It's scrutinized and fetishized, with a Palin-esque power to polarize." Pizza is like Sarah Palin? Like a fetishized Sarah Palin? Leave it to the liberal media to inject politics into a food article.

The article went on to say that there are now "classically trained" pizza chefs (perhaps who can play baroque concertos), that pizza is "an art" that fosters "a cult," (though presumably less fanatical than that Jim Jones group with Kool Aid in Guyana), that crust too often "lacks character" (maybe the crusts are seeing someone in Argentina instead of hiking the Appalachian Trail), and that the New York pizza craze began in exactly 2004. (Not before or after. The question remains - On what day in 2004?)

Like all proper religions, if pizza is to be worshipped, it requires (not to go all Judeo-Christian) Commandments. Four are sufficient:

1. Thou shalt not consume pizza prepared south of the Mason-Dixon Line or west of Chicago. It is an abomination to thine taste buds.

2. Thou shalt not place pineapple or any other foodstuff not native to Italy on a pizza.

3. Thou shalt not order pizza from a national chain. Like snowflakes, no two local pizzas are alike, but all are good.

4. Thou shalt not order delivery pizza. Half the fun of the Pizza Experience is the breathless race home before the pie congeals into barely-edible coldness. Plus, there's nothing like that pizza aroma embedded in your car's upholstery forever.