Food Politics

Who cares about the calories. That’s the least of anyone’s worries if they consume this “meal” (term used loosely). Between the dough in the conventional pizza, the soda, and then the dessert Orea pizza, I don’t think my pancreas could recover from all the insulin it would need to produce to process all that sugar! Makes me ill to think about it.

I recently spent a couple of weeks in Italy, the last week of which was in the country-side college town of Perugia. I found a local pizza shop that had fantastic hand-thrown pizzas, with spicy sauces and tasty cheese. My favorite topping was some kind of sweet sausage. They gave me the Italian word for it, and I imagined some little old woman making sausages by hand in the back room. Three days I ate this for lunch, it was so good! On my last day in town, I finally recognized the sausages. They were hot dogs. I’d been eating hot dog pizza all week and loving every minute of it.

Thanks to Andy Bellatti of Small Bites (see Blogroll) for providing the nutrient analyses, obtained from a local Domino Pizza. For starters, the dessert pizza is 10 inches in diameter which serves eight! So 1/8 of the pizza contains:

120 calories
4 g fat
1 g saturated fat
0 g trans fats
0 mg cholesterol
110 mg sodium
20g carbohydrates
1 gram dietary fiber
8 g sugar (2 teaspoons)
2% calcium

That’s fine for 1/8–a mere bite. And here comes the ingredient list, which totally violates my “no more than 5 ingredients rule”: CRUST: Flour (Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour), Water, Soybean Oil, Malt Extract, Chocolate Flavor (Natural and Artificial Flavors, Cocoa, Maltodextrin, Gum Acacia), Yeast, Dextrose, Leavening (Sodium Bicarbonate, Corn Starch, Monocalcium Phosphate), Calcium Propionate and Soy Lecithin
VANILLA SAUCE: Water, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Corn Syrup, Sugar, Starch, Contains less than 2% of Salt, Titanium Dioxide, Cellulose Gel, Natural and Artificial Flavor, Polysorbate 60. Freshness preserved with Potassium Sorbate and Sodium Benzoate
Oreo® Cookie Crumbs: Sugar, Enriched Flour (Wheat Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate {Vitamin B1}, Riboflavin {Vitamin B2}, Folic Acid), Palm and/or High Oleic Canola and/or Soybean Oil, Cocoa (Processed with Alkali), High Fructose Corn Syrup, Baking Soda, Cornstarch, Salt, Soy Lecithin (Emulsifier), Vanillin (an Artificial Flavor), Chocolate

WHITE ICING: Water, Corn Syrup, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Modified Corn Starch. Contains less than 2% of Each: Soybean Oil, Cellulose Gel, Mono and Diglycerides, Polysorbate 60, Natural and Artificial Flavor, Titanium Dioxide. Freshness Preserved with Sodium Benzoate and Potassium Sorbate. Contains Soy, Wheat (Product is manufactured in a facility that processes peanuts and tree nuts.)

Yum?

Nasty stuff, indeed.