The life of a pizza is short, and simple. Drawing parallels to life is a breeze seeing as our lives are short and simple as well. I'm going to go through the different stages in the pizza process and explain how it can be compared to the human circle of life.
It all begins, depending on your description, as a sweaty, passionate mess, mixed together to create life. With pizza, we can see the flour and water coming together as this mess, which is mixed, much like our emotions. The time the dough is being mixed can be compared to the stage from conception to birth.
The dough is ready, and so is the child. Our early stages of life are spent near our creator (mother) and if we consider the mixer to be the mother then this can be seen as true for the dough as well. As kids we take shape at this age, we learn and develop our basic motor skills. The dough is not alive, but we give it shape, we roll the dough or put it in our hands and lightly kneed it into a nice ball. This dough ball is covered with plastic to keep the air away from it, as children we are bundled up to go outside, or just to make us look cute.
Time for school! Our dough is held in the refrigerator, and depending on your view of school, you might consider school merely a holding pin for your kids. Anyway, they grow up, the years pass, learn a few things, and get taller. Our dough rises a bit, getting noticeably larger, as for learning anything, maybe the dough learns that it is cold in the fridge.
Ok, it's graduation time. All the dough will be flattened to fit in the pans, and nearly all kids will get a diploma or GED. At this point, there are more choices and options, college, to work, bum around at home and such. For the dough we have different sized pans, which will begin to separate the dough into categories. Here you can consider free will, and whether our choices were really made by use, or a matter of predestination as might be seen in the dough’s case. For our purposes we will say all our dough goes to college.
The dough will rest in the pans a while, this time laps can be seen as the time in college. When the pizza is taken to be made into a pizza it has completed or dropped out of college and begun its career. We add pizza sauce and cheese; family, kids. Then a few pepperoni, maybe some bell pepper, oh, and some flavored crust! These toppings can be thought of as the advances, raises, awards in our careers and jobs. At this point the pizza is ready for the oven.
At the end of our careers, the next logical step is retirement. When thinking about retirement, who can resist the thought of Florida. Is Florida hot? Guess what else is, the oven. So we find the oven to be the last run, you've lived your life, and now you’re in Florida soaking in the sun, getting baked, and then you die. A moment of silence please for the dead pizza and Floridians..........
Here is when it gets a little morbid. Our once beautiful and cheery yellow pizza boxes are in fact coffins for the pizza. This is pretty much the end of the pizzas life, but there's just one last thing. Your all familiar with the long motorcades from a funeral home to the cemetery, just as with the motorcade, our pizza has to make one final trip as well, to our customer. This makes our drivers, chauffeurs driving the pizza hertz.
This may be the end of my article, but this is far from the end for people and pizza. There will be evolutions in people, as we have already begun to see, and there will no doubt be changes to pizza, the dough may stay the same, but the ingredients ever combined to entice the apatite. So with that next bite, understand that something good can come out of the end of something else.