No, I Will Not Take and Bake!

I've decided I hate Take & Bake pizza joints (I'm looking at you Papa Murphy's). The delight of pizza is that it isn't food you will make at home. It's greasy, caloric, completely unhealthy and is delivered right to your door by a pimply teenager or a tattooed, small-time criminal. (There's also a contingent of overweight late-20's men that I'm pretty sure will show up on Dateline: To Catch A Predator at some point).

There is something inside me that gets a thrill when a pizza delivery driver almost runs me off the road, blows through a red light and takes a corner at 40 mpg just to get that cheesy, pepperoni-y goodness to a waiting house.  I can almost feel the excitement when the doorbell rings, or, if you are in college, your cell phone goes off.

But you expect me to take and bake?  You expect me to walk into my house with a pizza that isn't even warm?  To try to duplicate the effect of their expensive, never cleaned, ovens with mine?  The grime of the ages, the cheese splatterings from a thousand other orders, that's what gives a delivery pizza its allure. It's like a finely seasoned, never washed cast iron skillet. My pristine oven cannot impart magic to that take and bake pizza. There's a reason Digiorno spends it's entire marketing budget pretending that it's just like delivery. But this, it's not delivery, it's not Digiorno, it's take and bake. Yuck!

Not only do I like delivery pizza for it's flavor, but I consider my commitment to commercial pizza to be a slap in the face of the 1%. I don't have enough money to import a chef from Italy to make me pizza whenever I want, so I choose the better option. Here is what I vow

• I choose to support people's jobs by lazily dialing up Papa John's and ordering a pizza!
• I choose to support Stanley Steamer by accidentally spilling Papa John's garlic sauce on my carpet!
• I choose to support the carpet industry by purchasing new carpet because that oily, garlicky goodness has not only discolored my carpet but smells like an Italian skunk died on my floor!
• I choose to support the cosmetics industry by purchasing concealer for all the zits I get from eating pure cheese and grease!
• I choose to support the medical industry by ending up on cholesterol medication from too much pizza!

So there, my support of delivery pizza is not just taking a stand against the inferior quality of take and bake . . . it's also an economic philosophy and an example of protest through action! Take that Papa Murphy's . . . I, and the drivers for Papa Johns, are the 99%!