Chef Boy-Ar-Dee - Make your own "pizza holocaust".

Fairness dictates that, in this most perfect of all possible worlds, people can put whatever they like on a disc of dough and call it pizza. After all, it's a free country (Canada, I mean) and who are we to judge? This is what fairness dictates. Go! Plaza is located in Chicago, however, and we have an opinion or two about pizza. Fairness can dictate all it wants. I'd like to invite fairness to screw itself.

We cannot blame the Germans for this atrocity. After their general naughtiness of 1940-ish, the Germans did their best to apologize by making Mercedeses and BMWses, even if they cost too much for nearly all but the douchiest of bags to afford.

No, we had the staff gourmands at Chef Boy-Ar-Dee to thank for this. In 1973, they determined that there weren't enough ways to eat their watery tomato sauce and powdered cheese concoction, and so the unholy union of sauerkraut and tomato sauce was born into an unsuspecting world. Yet another shitty pizza was inflicted on an the American market. The German Chancellor immediately called a press conference to desperately shout Germany's innocence: "Wir haben nicht diese!"

Just to keep people from mistakenly identifying the sauerkraut for Mozzarella (Heavens no!), they arranged the kraut into little piles. They look like little barrow mounds. If one was really clever, one could put little anchovies under them to represent tiny barrow-wights that sleep in chilled silence, eternally marking the years in stillness and darkness... because nobody's going to eat this rancid pizza!

We shouldn't expect much from Chef Boy-Ar-Dee. The product shot on the front of the box declares to the world their profound misunderstanding of what pizza should look like. A puddle of red with sprinkled cheese powder is NOT a pizza. Sure, they got the shape right, but that's a low bar.

I once had a "pizza" in a trendy sidewalk cafe' in Charlotte NC. It was a dough disc about 8 inches in diameter with no tomato sauce, swiss cheese and bits of chicken on it. This was also not pizza, but they also got the shape right. Maybe the list of requirements for pizzahood consists of a single bullet point: "round"? By this logic, I could easily say that last week I spent five hundred dollars buying a set of four new pizzas for my car. They have as much in common with pizza as Chef Boy -Ar-Dee's German pizza does, and they'll last as long before someone eats them.