Something funny (or appalling) from "Not Always Right" :)

Ordering Pizza, Talking Baloney
School | Colorado Springs, CO, USA

(I am a lunch lady at a high school, and one of the students there is going to be leaving for a trip to Italy soon.)

Me: “What kind of pizza would you like?”

Student: “One pepperoni, one cheese.”

Me: “So are you excited to spend two months in Italy?”

Student: “Yeah, but I’m really going to miss all the good food here at school. Especially pizza.”

Me: “But you’ll be in Italy right? So you can have pizza there.”

Student: “Yeah but it won’t be authentic pizza from America. It’ll just be cheap Italian knock-offs.”

:o

even if it's school lunch room pizza, when he's confronted with a dizzying array of fine cuisine for the first time in his life.

More adventurous kids will profit greatly from being exposed to food from outside the US heartland.

to be as international as it is, i.e., Houston, Texas :)

There's a wealth of cuisines to choose from, yet I've met plenty of narrow-minded (usually Republicans/Teabaggers) that only think of BBQ or other traditionally American meat-centric dishes. When the suggestion was made to branch out, especially in this town, they balked like I was suddenly speaking a "foreign" language. I guess if it's not 'murrican, it is foreign.

By the way, if you'd like an idea of how diverse our cuisine choices are around here, our local weekly rag recently published the following excellent cover story:

Planet Houston: The world's great cuisines converge here.

Who knows? Y'all might want to visit just to sample the food :D

we try to expose our kids to as many experiences as possible?

When he comes back, if his parents have done a good job, he'll have an interesting story for that lunch lady.


I will never forget sitting in the back of a puppet show my daughter was attending when
the puppeteer asked for a list of yuckie foods, when he got to spinach my sweet kiddlet raised
her hand and said - but I LIKE it!

Made me proud.

because he learned nothing ;)
While I've never been to Italy, I feel I know something about what to expect for even just pizza, thanks to the likes of Rick Steves, Cook's Illustrated and just eating good authentic and non-chain pizzas.

I liked your story, too. I don't have kids, but I'd have been encouraged to have heard a child admit such a thing, too :)

One other thing that helps educate children about different kinds of vegetable to like or at least try: home gardening.

Sometimes kids are lucky enough to be taught how to garden at school (usually as a special program) so they learn more about food at an earlier age. And you don't see examples of food un-recognition as we saw in that Jamie Oliver series earlier this year...

My daughters would wander through while I worked and pull up a spring onion, brush off the dirt and chow down.
Anything was fair game....

They're coming for dinner on Halloween.
When I told them we were having oxtail stew they both made that yummy sound....:9

I credit that to her growing up in an Italian family. She also loves anchovies, and mussels!

.... and a smart Mom!:hug:

probably won't be able to appreciate the gastronomical joy that is true Italian pizza. Maybe two months in country will educate his ignorant taste buds.

My prediction? The ungrateful lout spends all his time seeking out the McDonalds that inevitably pollute the area around Italian train stations.

Sorry if I'm being to harsh on the kid, but "cheap Italian knock-offs" leads me to believe he's being raised by parents who are rich enough to afford a lengthy stay in Italy, but too poor in spirit to really deserve such a treat.

Which is not necessarily an Italian invention.

My take on the whole thing is that pizza as people in the US know it...was invented in the US.

And, as a kid, I REALLY liked the pizza served in my school cafeteria, and I had access to "real" pizza, too. In my later years, I figured out why. The pizza in the lunchroom had lots of sauce on it. It wasn't just a dry,open-faced grilled cheese sandwich. It had sauce. Good sauce. To this day, I order my pizzas with extra sauce. Makes all the difference.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1695/who-invented-pizza

I moved to Phoenix, AZ from NY when I was 22. It's starting to get better here as far as restaurants, but still not nearly like it was in NYC.

I wish I could find good Jewish rye bread (they don't even sell mass market rye bread in the grocery stores. No pumpernickel either). It's so "white bread" here, no real multi-cultural ethnicity. Even the hero rolls are soft & white. No independent bakeries, butcher shops, etc. And don't get me started on Chinese restaurants - in over 20 years, I haven't found a single decent one.

"It's not like home, I can't get this, that or the other thing like they make back home. They don't even sell X, and good luck getting Y" Substitute "America" for "NYC" and "Italy" for "Phoenix" and it looks like the same thing the kid in the original post was supposedly complaining about.

I've spent more time in the Phoenix area than I really care to, and while there are many things about the area that bother me the food isn't one of them. No multicultural identity? In a region where 40% of the population are of Mexican ancestry? Have you been to the Guadalupe area - there's a great seafood restaurant there. Tempe has a thriving Moslem community, complete with a nice little restaurant near the Islamic center with a Middle Eastern grocery attached. Instead of complaining about not being able to get New York style food why not explore modern Southwest cuisine - there's a lot of it in the Phoenix area. When in Rome...

(I did find a credible New York style pizza in a hole-in-the-wall place near Litchfield Park, which I'm sure I'll never be able to find again.)

No, in fact it's not like the OP.

I do appreciate what I CAN get here. I'm well aware that we have a large Mexican population - I've lived here over 20 years. So, yes, I can get great Mexican, southwestern, etc. I do have a favorite Mediterranean place here that has North African food. My favorite restaurant here is Cuban. All I'm saying is, that there are certain things that I could get in NY that I can't get here. Comparatively speaking, it is less "ethnic" here than in NY. By that, I mean that there is less of a VARIETY here (eg. where's the Hungarian restaurant?).

It wasn't a complaint. It was more "wistfulness". It's not an "either or". I don't think it's unreasonable to miss certain things you grew up with.

I grew up in an Italian family in Ohio. When I moved here 13 years ago, I was totally appalled by what they serve as pizza down here. It has gotten a little bit better, but because transplants from other places have moved in and opened up restaurants.

We do have Lebanese, Mexican, Mediterranean, Chinese, and a very little Thai and Indian. None are all that great because they have to appeal to the tastes of the natives here. I lived in Columbus, and because of OSU the population was becoming more diverse all the time so it was better, but still not great. Here, blah!

I had problems finding many of my favorite things in the grocery stores. And don't even get me started on the search for good Italian sausage! :eyes:

I've decided that the bottom line where pizza in this country is concerned is that it all depends on what you grew up with and are used to.


Welcome to C&B. :hi:

The main shop is near the airport. He has a smaller deli on Bell Rd. It's a Polish butcher, but they have grocery items, including bread. They have good rye and pumpernickel breads, and the sausages are excellent. So are the homemade pierogies.

http://www.stanleys-sausage.com/home.html

I wish I had a dollar every time someone told me this place or that had the BEST pizza in the world. It all depends on what you like: red sauce, light sauce, white sauce, char, no char, thin, thick, heavy cheese, meats, grilled veggies, etc.

I enjoyed the phrase "cheap Italian knock-offs." :D

Here, in the South, "barbecue" is slow-cooked, pulled/chopped pork with sauce added just before eating. In the Midwest, and in Texas, they use beef, rather than pork, and often coat with a dry rub. But, it's still slow-cooked, with sauce added later. A few summers ago, I worked with a kid from Connecticut. She was horrified that she had to put her own sauce on her meat at the local barbecue here in SC. After all, when you barbecue, you slather barbecue sauce onto whatever meat is cooking on your grill, while it's cooking--in her eyes, anyway. To a Southerner, and to us displaced Midwesterners, what she thinks is "barbecue" is actually "grilling."