United We Stand- with pizza!

Keith mans the mud oven


Evan just before being splattered with a pizza... just kidding

My delicious pizza before it became a calzone

Pre-calzone

With garden fresh tomatoes and basil

All the toppings fit to eat

I have known for eighteen years the benefits of eating straight from your own front yard, but making pizza in the clay oven was the first time that I have used homemade ingredients in such a manner. Having helped propogate the vegetables myself, I took great satisfaction in eating my creation, but more than satiating the munchies, I got to look at food not only as such, but as part of the cycle that Pollan describes in his book. The manure that is trucked into the UW farm is recycled and eliminates the waste problem; as Michael Pollan notes, "there is no waste problem in nature." Waste to one is food to another, and I felt that experiencing the food cycle in a practical manner makes me look around the curtain in many other areas as well: who thinks of themself as part of the food cycle? Generally I feel that humans are a dead end, but as my Environmental Science field trip taught me, guess what fertilizes your veggies? In Texas, we call it 'Dillo Dirt,'

Anyways, growing toppings was only the beginning of the difficulties. My pizza was stuck to the plate and ended up so deformed I ended up with a calzone. Getting the pizza into the oven required the sacrifice of Keith's arm hair, and while he was singeing himself to make our food, the class began to interact in a manner that I hadn't seen before. I realized that the communal activity had created a community that rallied around the shared activity. This added a whole new element to my Anthropology of Food experience: food as a social tool, akin to the food Fisher discusses in her article "A Thing Shared." Food becomes something we united around, something that brought us together more than any project or assignment ever could.

Pizza Ingredients:

Trader Joe's pizza crust

Trader Joe's tomato sauce

Trader Joe's cheese (American but I'm not sure)

Tomato

Basil

Onion