The Salad Pizza

Image from http://piezonis.com

            Health is a very funny thing. Some days, one glass of wine is considered healthy, others three glasses of wine a day will give you heart healthy benefits, and some day; two glasses of wine a day will supposedly give you cancer. We as a society regard health as things that are green, natural, or taste like nothing. Often due to gas ripening processes, food products might be green, kind of natural, and taste like nothing all at the same time. We tend to rely quite heavily on science, funded by who knows, telling us such and such about things and stuff. When science seems too contradictive, we just add lettuce and call it a day. I work at a local pizza place in Easton, not ten minutes from Wheaton. This will be my third year working there, and tonight, I will probably make an average of seven “Mixed Greens Pizza’s”.  This is one of our specialties that are beloved by middle class white women who come in groups, and strictly dads in Patagonia jackets after a holiday or Bruins/Patriots games.            

The pizza itself is comprised of, pizza crust, parmesan peppercorn dressing, ‘mixed greens lettuce’, tomatoes, black olives, red onions, grilled chicken, feta cheese, and Greek dressing. It is literally a salad on a pizza, and Easton folks love it. As I have found in my experience, the sales of this pizza increase after certain holidays such as Halloween, Easter, Thanksgiving, and bigger local sports games. I understand this to be the attempt at leveling out an unhealthy diet, with a perceived healthy one.            

The correlation between unhealthy holiday and game foods, and the sales of the Mixed Greens Pizza, has not been recorded. However, I have come to the conclusion that people regard it as the compromised healthier option due to their attitude around it, and the mumbling people use when choosing it. Little known fact, many people talk to themselves before ordering food. Very often, I hear a long list of options they are considering before actually placing their order. And even more often, people choose this pizza after rattling off a list of “… loaded waffle fries, no, okay I don’t want a steak and cheese… maybe a pizza…. Okay, can I just have the salad pizza”. Another reason for the perceived health benefits of this pizza is the fact that people call it ‘the salad pizza’ or sometimes ‘the field of greens pizza’. These invented names, although quite similar to the actual name of the pizza, allude to the understanding that it is comprised of healthy products. However, the two dressings alone, including the Italian dressing that the chicken is cooked with, probably ranges to about 210-260 calories.  And according to their website, a small, 10-inch Mixed Greens Pizza is 1561 calories. Where as a small, 10-inch regular cheese pizza is 974 calories. Calories do not necessarily regard health, and the comprised ingredients within a food product hold more weight than the accumulation of calorie numbers. The Mixed Green pizza merely represents the confusion and solution we as consumers face when attempting to regulate diets, and consume perceived ‘healthy food’.