Let’s Pizza: An Invitation We Will Hopefully Turn
Down

post from CalorieLab - Health News & Information Blog on 27 June 2012 02:05:41 PM. © CalorieLab - Health News & Information Blog

Let's Pizza

(CC) Let's Pizza

Rage Against the Machine… And All Its Toppings!

“There’s really only one story on people’s mind — the thing in November that could change the direction of the country. Americans are going to have to make a choice. Are they ready to accept pizza from vending machines?”

–Opening monologue, “The Late Show with Craig Ferguson,” June 14.

You’ve probably heard something about Let’s Pizza, which has been in the news lately, as befits the first automatic pizza making-baking-and-vending machine. Because if humanity has been clamoring for anything, it’s a machine that you put money in and out comes a pizza. But you probably haven’t been brought up to speed on all the details, so here.

Let’s Pizza machines are the brainchild of Italian Claudio Torghel, who has discovered that they’re working out fairly well in Europe, so why not go after the Big Dog? That’s us. The way they work is by robotically mixing and kneading flour and water into dough, rolling it into a pie, adding toppings from a refrigerated single-serving packet, and cooking it in an infrared oven. There are four different pizza combos to choose from, the process takes less than three minutes, the pies are 10.5 inches wide and include a take-home box, and they’ll cost about $6 a pop. Let’s Pizza is expected to debut here by Christmas.

This is all wonderful news, unless you’re a medical professional, or nutritionist, or public health worker, or somebody who sends your kids out into the world with lunch money and hopes they’ll spend it wisely, or just care about our national weight problem. Pizza, a veritable symphony of fats and dough and calories, has already ballooned from an occasional novelty meal in the 1960s to the seventh most eaten dinner item in America. We need a nationwide network of machines that crank them out in three minutes like we need more diabetes, which we could very well get if this thing catches on.

Take note that you haven’t heard anyone announcing any plans for vending machines that produce fruit platters or tossed salads, which should be child’s play for any technology capable of making a pizza. Our only dietary hope is that the whole pizza-vend-o-mat concept will strike the public as so preposterous, tacky and unappealing that Signore Torghel’s invention falls flat on its face here. And there is the possibility that such might be the case. For example, our quote up top from Craig Ferguson, who devoted a whole chunk of his opening monologue to making fun of Let’s Pizza. Naturally, we have more excerpts.

“Just when you thought America couldn’t get any more awesome, pizza vending machines! Even guys in al-Qaida are like, ‘So conflicted. I hate America, but come on!’”

“Apparently these pizza machines roll out the dough, knead it, and then bake it in three minutes. That’s fast. The only machine that bakes things faster is Willie Nelson’s tour bus.

“Some places have medical marijuana vending machines. I’m not a fancy-pants businessman, but I’m guessing you may want to put one of them pot machines next to the pizza machine.”

One last point: The average annual cheese consumption per person in the U.S. rocketed from 11.4 pounds in 1970 to a stunning 33.3 pounds in 2010, with the main contributor to this spike being the growing popularity of you know what.

Let’s pizza? Gee… let’s not.