The Year in Pizza

It's probably blasphemous to call 2015 the "year of pizza," what with everything going on in the world and all, but pizza did make some big, cheesy strides this year in Kokomo and beyond.

March brought Oscar's Pizza to downtown Kokomo, a funky little pizza place on North Buckeye downtown that serves up one of K-town's finest (and few) New York Style pizzas. They do it by-the-slice at lunch and offer dynamite garlic knots and a waaay better-than-average selection of craft brews. Here's hoping their $2 Tuesdays becomes a permanent thing. (Click here for the ASOK* review.)

Meanwhile back East, Colin Atrophy Hagendorf published the shockingly-good Slice Harvester: A Memoir in Pizza, an idea-turned-blog-turned-book that made its way onto NPR's list of the year's best books.

Hagendorf demonstrates how to eat NY style pizza.

Broke, bummed, and delivering burritos in NYC, Hagendorf, who calls himself "the Slice Harvester," embarked on a mission in 2009 to eat, rate, and write about a plain slice of cheese pizza from each pizzeria in Manhattan. In two years, the Slice Harvester plowed through over 400 slices. Along the way he learns something about how to be a better person, lover, bicycle burrito delivery guy, etc. Touching stuff, check it out.

This was also a year for neo-populism, with Bernie Sanders chewing up the DNC's power structure and scaring hell out of Clintonites, the rich, and watered-down dems of all flavors.

Sounds like my last pizza party. 

Where there's populism, there's pizza. At least that's the central argument of Carol Helstosky's Pizza: A Global History, a bite-sized morsel of nutritional anthropology and cultural studies that made it onto my year-end "best of" list. (Alas, it came out in 2008, and I'm just now getting around to reading it; c'e la vie.)

Helstosky traces the rise of pizza as a truly global food in its relatively short, 200-year history. When you think about how long other staples of human civilization like tortillas, beer, and cheese have been around--by some estimates we've had the basic ingredients for a successful Taco Tuesday since 5,000 BCE--it's striking that it took us until the late 1700s to finally make the cognitive and culinary leap to a pie topped with cheese and tomatoes.

Pizza, she suggests, was an economic bellwether whose toppings reflected the ebb and flow of the Neopolitan economy. Naples was and remains a coastal metropolis and important cultural center in southern Italy known for its plump tomatoes and seafood, so luckily for everyone alive today, the earliest pies were larded with whatever goodness happened to be available and cheap: fresh fish, tomatoes and cheese, fruit, even plain olive oil.

Authentic Neopolitan pizza and opera available here.

A street food sold by vendors from carts and stoops, pizza was particularly popular among the poor of Naples who could eat it on-the-go and on-demand, which if you think about it is not at all unlike how most of us consume pizza today. By which I mean ordering from your smartphone and standing over the sink, of course. Pizza in 2015 was far and away the most popular food ordered via apps and the web.

Just as pizza was originally the food of the dispossessed in nineteenth-century Naples, so too has pizza long been a favorite among another group of the mostly destitute--college students. But until earlier this year, "majoring in pizza" just meant you ate all the Papa John's after everyone else at the party passed out.

Not anymore. The UK's Manchester Metropolitan University, in partnership with Pizza Hut, began offering a university-level degree in "pizza production and financial analysis," whatever that means, though I suspect it has something to do with carefully studying every TMNT movie and kneeling daily to genuflect in the direction of Wichita, Kansas. (The birthplace of Pizza Hut, duh.)

Back to Indiana. 2015 brought Kokolocals a few new pizza places, including the fast-growing delivery franchise Marco's Pizza and, more recently, Hot Box, which has long been an Indy and Purdue staple, as well as something of a personal fave of yours truly. I'm a sucker for the gratis Tootsie Rolls they toss in the box, among other things.

It really is kind of a hut.

So wherever you find yourself this year for Christmas, bring together family and friends and enjoy a piping hot pizza. Merry Christmas, everyone! See you in the new year.