As many of you know, I’ve been eating a lot of frozen pizzas during the NIT. Six so far, to be exact, with a few more right before the NIT began (the NIT began ten days ago, for those abstaining from the NIT this year). As many of you may not know, I often don’t do my own grocery shopping. I know, I know, big deal over here, but that’s one of the chores I don’t usually do. I clean the toilets, I clean the kitchen a bit more, I don’t normally buy groceries. So, when I put “five frozen pizzas” on the grocery list on Sunday with no specifications beyond “(a mix),” I was vulnerable. I was susceptible to attack. And the person in the household who does buy the groceries took advantage of that vulnerability to attempt to add a few years back onto my life. She bought pizzas with vegetables on them.
Not all of the pizzas. This wasn’t an unkind act. There was a supreme one in there with sausage and peppers that’s probably my favorite one from Trader Joe’s (the frozen pizza game at Trader Joe’s is pretty weak, not gonna lie). But the other four were all made with health on the mind, and this is something we need to discuss. Because three of the four health-conscious pizzas weren’t great.
If I’m eating a frozen pizza, chances are high I’m not doing it for my own health. Or rather, chances are high I’m not doing it for my own physical health. I’m doing it for my mental health, and my emotional health, since frozen pizza makes me happy and fills me up on days when I need a lot of calories to keep chugging along.
For others, though, I know this might not be the case. Eating healthy is hard (see: this blog post). It takes time, or it takes money, or the stuff doesn’t taste good. I understand why some might look at a frozen pizza and say, “Hey, this one looks healthy, thank God because I need something healthy but I can’t stand a salad right now and I can’t afford a salmon rice bowl from some swanky fast casual chain.”
The problem with the healthy pizzas, then, isn’t their existence. It’s that sometimes, they stink. It’s one thing to take a cauliflower crust, put a layer of cheese on it, mix in some jalapeños and maybe a couple slices of pepperoni, and give people something that tastes good, isn’t too caloric, and has a few vitamins involved. It’s another to take a normal frozen pizza and assault it with wet green peppers and slimy, much-too-big pieces of previously-uncooked onion. This is where we get hurt, as a society, because not only are the pizzas not really that healthy, but they don’t taste good at all. It’s past the acceptable level of satisfaction sacrifice. Just makes the whole thing sad.
So, I beseech the market. Keep fostering unhealthy frozen pizza. That stuff rocks. But on the healthy side, please consider whether a frozen pizza is going to be unacceptably bad-tasting before you let it out of the lab. Actions have consequences.
