"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
--Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias"
--Chef Boy-Ar-Dee, 1963 frozen pizza ad
You're looking at a slice of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee Frozen Pizza. This unassuming piece of food was central in the most grievous fraud ever perpetrated on American consumers. For while the item to your left was manufactured by Bo-Ar-Dee, and it was indeed frozen, it most certainly is not pizza.
For years and years, this so-called "pizza" scarred the memories of Baby Boomers. On the pizzamaking.com forums, the most charitable comment about it says, "The pizza is certainly something altogether different than 'real' pizza but I still like it, and perhaps for more than sentimental reasons." Others range from "It had the texture of cardboard" to a plaintive emoticon representing nausea.
Clearly, their advertising claims of "pizzeria-perfect" taste and "tender, crunchy crust" were blatant lies. But worst of all by far is the god-awful appearance of the "pizza." It simply does not look like food. It's more like bad modern art, or a landscape from another planet, or a really ghastly skin disease. There are many possible answers; pizza is not one of them. Here are some lovely close-up views of the slice.
You can thank me later for those. I put one as my desktop background; that didn't last long. Continue to the next page if you dare for more Boy-Ar-Dee Pizza horrors.
