Chicken Should Never
Be Put on a Pizza
Below are Daniel’s notes for his
argument in the Five Good Reasons debate on ABC Local Radio
1. Pizzas are essentially Italian. A pizza should be like
the Italian flag. Red things, like beef or pepperoni, go on top; white things
like the base and cheese go on the bottom; green things, like basil, olives or
capsicum, go through the pizza. Chicken is white and is generally put on pizzas
at the expense of red things - it upsets the pizza’s natural Italianity to put
white things where the red things should be. You need red, white and green for
an Italian pizza. If you just have green and white, you have
2. Chicken is a wonderful food, but it has stepped outside its brief here. Chicken is there for the vulnerable times in life. When we are sick, we eat chicken soup. We have an illness called chicken pox. When we are scared, we don’t say we’re cow or we’re sausage, we say we’re chicken. But pizza is not vulnerable; pizza is robust. We eat pizzas when we're watching the football, when we're having a party, when we've got a whole bunch of people in the one place. This is not the domain of chicken. You don't want the spots from what's in the box with the dots.
3. I’m not against change; I’m against bad change, and unfortunately, the introduction of chicken to pizzas, bad enough in itself, paved the way for the introduction of something far worse to pizzas – barbecue sauce. Barbecue sauce is to pizzas what cane toads are to native wildlife, and unlike cane toads, you can’t get rid of barbecue sauce with a golf club. Once again, the natural order is upset. Barbecue sauce contains ingredients like soy sauce, mustard, vinegar, all things that are supposed to go on top of food, not under it. As a result, barbecue sauce is self-seeking, it tries to dominate the pizza. It doesn’t compliment the food; it wants to be the food. It can’t handle only being a condiment. That’s why it has constantly campaigned against beef (which is strong enough to take it on) in favour of chicken, the lackey of meats, meek enough to submit to the barbecue sauce. Tomato sauce, on the other hand, is supportive and gentle. It says to the meat, “I’m here for you.” It’s secure enough in itself to support whatever meat is gracious enough to join it, but deep within the heart of every tomato, it longs to be with a meat of its own colour.
4. This is actually an issue of class warfare. A general rule of Italian cooking is that dishes with red sauces come from the tomato-rich but economically poor south, while white sauces come from the more affluent, industrialised north. The pizza, while there is doubt about who invented it, was perfected by the southern Italians. But like all good products of the poor and honest, it was stolen and commercialised by the rich – the Fiat-driving, Armani-wearing northerners. By supporting chicken on pizzas, you are supporting the exploitation of the poor, you are supporting the degradation of Italian farmland, but worst of all, you’re supporting barbecue sauce.
(As a side note, the tomato was originally thought to be poisonous, which must have disappointed any suicidal Neapolitans who tried to end it all by filling themselves with antioxidants.)
5. Have you ever wondered why chicken and beef are priced
fairly similarly in the supermarket, but when you order a pizza, they charge
you up to $2 extra for chicken? It’s because the pizza makers are embarrassed
to put it on. Oh, they’re commercial enterprises so they’ll supply it if the
demand is there but deep down they know what a travesty they are committing.
That’s why chicken pizzas always taste a little saltier than proper pizzas,
because every time a pizza-maker adds a piece of chicken to a pizza, they shed
a little tear. And with every tear, they face
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