Pizza pie in the sky

What is one to make of the US military laboratory’s claim that it is close to creating a pizza for combat troops that can be stored in room temperatures for up to three years and still be both edible and palatable? Researcher Michelle Richardson said a key challenge in fulfilling the troops’ longing for pizza was keeping the moisture from the toppings from making the dough soggy and unappealing.

One flippant response is that this is nothing new. In the popular imagination, three year old pizzas in college dorms and adolescent boys’ bedrooms across the world are declared to still be edible, even though this probably says more about the food-quality standards of these consumers than it does about the pizza itself.

Another take is to wonder if this is a variation on the tale of Nasa spending a small fortune to invent a pen capable of writing in zero-gravity when the Russians simply used a pencil. Although the space-pen theory has been debunked (pen manufacturer Paul Fisher created it unbidden then donated the technology to Nasa, while pencils represent a fire risk in space), it persists because tales of wasteful spending are what people like to believe – just as they do about dorm-room pizzas.