Bad pizzas

Just as a glass of wine can be envisaged as either half-full or rather half-empty, there are two ways of reacting to the following news item concerning products of the US company General Mills:

— On the one hand, a positive-minded observer would say that it's great to see that a big company is prepared to accept publicly the onus of recalling all that bad food.

— On the other hand, a negative-minded observer [such as me] would say that it's alarming to discover that such an astronomical quantity of shit can be produced and distributed to buyers. In other words, it would have been far more reassuring if the factory had discovered all these bad pizzas while they were still sitting in their Ohio warehouse, well before their shipment to stores.

I've been tempted to try out supermarket pizzas two or three times, but they're invariably either hard or rubbery, and generally tasteless. To my mind, feasting on a pizza should be a special eating event, of an almost solemn nature: quite the opposite of stuffing down rubbish to avoid feeling hungry. That's why I recall many of my most memorable pizzas. For example, one of the latest delicious pizzas that comes to mind was served up in an Italian restaurant in South Kensington last August. Down in Marseille, Natacha's parents have found an outstanding pizza delivery service. Once upon a time, my friend Georges used to prepare fine pizzas in the wood oven of his restaurant Le Jorjane in Choranche. Last but not least, some of the best pizzas I've ever eaten were made in my kitchen at Gamone. Hey, it'll soon be lunch time, and I happened to buy a cube of yeast yesterday at Nathalie's bakery in Pont-en-Royans. Thanks to the pretext of that article about shit food in Ohio, I've just found an answer to the trivial but pleasant question of deciding what to eat for my next meal.

PS Since finishing this article, I've seen that another US company, Cargill Inc, is voluntarily recalling more than 840,000 pounds [381,360 kilograms] of ground beef patties, after four children who ate their product developed an E. coli affliction. Recently, another US company, Topps Meat, recalled 21.7 million pounds [9,851,800 kilograms] of ground beef amid E. coli concerns, which caused the company to announce that it's going out of business. These figures are monstrous: literally, enough to make you sick.