Nothing is Too Impossible

About an hour ago I felt like the cells in my body were imploding. Collapsing in on themselves. I think I was seriously dehydrated, but couldn’t imagine why- after all, I had that frozen pizza for lunch (like I do pretty often) and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I drank some water and I guess I feel a little better now, but what the hell happened? Maybe there was something in that pizza- it was the first time I’d tried that brand…. maybe MSG or something.

I looked at the side of the packaging and the ingredients appeared normal - you know, the usual “contains less than 2% of….”, “soybean and/or corn oil”, and a few items that are probably preservatives or something (BHA, BHT, sodium nitrite).

Then something sort of unrelated caught my eye: “Serving size 1/5 pizza”. That’s right, one fifth. Now it starts getting interesting.

This bad boy was a square pepperoni pizza, about 10.5 inches square. If you want to try this at home, just draw a square on a post-it. Now divide that square into 5 equal parts. I bet by the time you figure it out your pizza’s cold. Even if it was round, 5 equal slices is no easy feat (you’d have to imagine the round pizza as a pentagon and cut from each point on the perimeter to the center- not to the other side).

Why the hell would they suggest a serving size that is so difficult to obtain? Why not just make it…. 1/4 of the pizza??? I can cut a square pizza into 4 pieces without a thought. A round pizza too.

Now, another point to consider: a 10.5 inch square pizza is a total of 110.25 square inches. The recommended serving size is therefore 22.05 square inches, or roughly 4 inches by 5 inches. About the size of a piece of bread. This is a meal? Perhaps the idea is that the pizza is an appetizer? I cut the pizza into four pieces, and ate most of it. Someone with a little more determination could polish the whole thing off no problema.

So, now we’ve got a serving size that is both ludicrously difficult to apportion, and ludicrously unsatisfying to the appetite. Why?

It might be because this pizza is so bad for you that you shouldn’t eat more than a couple of bites. Maybe.

I just ingested 3500mg of sodium. Yup. For what its worth, the USDA recommends a daily max of 2400mg for a 2500 calorie diet. Now don’t get me wrong, I like salt. But it is rare that I eat a teaspoon and a half (!) at any given meal, like I just did.

Incidentally, I just consumed about 30g of saturated fat… the recommended daily amount is 20g.

Sigh, I guess I’ll have a couple of celery stalks for dinner.

So you may want to take a closer look at the frozen pizzas in your freezer. And the next time you have a get-together with friends, remember that a couple of DiGiorno thin crust pepperoni pizzas will serve 10… and may help contribute to the yacht fund of your friendly neighborhood cardiovascular surgeon.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 2:31 pm and is filed under Food, Pizza. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.