This week’s question comes to us from Michael Walsh:

Can I eat the last slice of pizza in the box?

This is the wrong question to be asking.

The better question is “Am I hungry?” An even better follow-up question is “Am I the hungriest person here?” And, if you wanna get all Marxist about it (and trust that I do), an even better questions is “Who the fuck ate the other seven slices?”

Pizza etiquette is a fucking war zone, so let’s get the easy shit out of the way: Are you the only person in the house? Eat the last slice. Are you the last person left awake? Eat the last slice. (Morning pizza is great, but anyone left awake on the day the pizza is ordered has first dibs.) Have you gone around and asked everyone if they want the last slice? Eat the last slice. Did you just help someone move? You can eat the last slice. (Tell the friend you helped to order more. Helping someone move means endless pizza.) Are you the only person in the kitchen during a party where the pizza was left unattended? Fuck it. Eat the last slice. Did you have an exceptionally shit day? Eat the last slice. Are you super fucking high? You should probably eat the last slice, and then see what else might be in the fridge.

Is it a kid’s birthday party? No, you cannot eat the last slice. Is it an intervention for your friend Steve? No, you cannot eat the last slice. Are you at an exorcism? Last slice goes to Elijah. Are you treating your kid’s t-ball team to post-game pizza? No, you cannot take the last slice.

As someone who’s hosted events and ordered pizza for people, I always appreciate when the pizza boxes are empty at the end of the night. Finding that last remaining slice in a box is a pain in the ass. I’m now thinking I should eat it just so it doesn’t go to waste. Sure, I could save it for tomorrow, but I’m trying to clean up. I’m in the zone. I’m ready to run these boxes down to the recycling bin (because me recycling four pizza boxes is definitely going to offset the carbon emissions from your “make the boobs bigger” Claude prompts) and now I’m stuck with this lone slice of pizza, which is both a problem and delicious. I will probably end up just eating it, which means I’ve eaten a slice of pizza I most definitely didn’t need, and will probably end up sleeping like shit. So if I invite you to something at my house, please just eat the last slice in the box.

Speaking of events at my house, I used to be the guy who’d walk around and ask what kind of pizza people wanted. And because I know both meat-eaters and vegetarians, I’d usually end up with a couple of vegetarian pizzas, and a couple of pepperoni pizzas. And here’s where we go Stanford Prison Experiment. If you put both kinds of pizza out for people at least half the meat eaters will say “oh, that veg (they always say just “veg,” by the way, because saying “vegetarian” is too exhausting and they need to save their energy to, I dunno, hunt?) looks really good” and then taking a slice. Which meant that they were dipping into the resources of people who they knew wouldn’t dip into their pepperoni resources. Their pepperoni resources were safe from counterattack. I’m sure there’s a Marxist name for this, but I’ll just call it violence. This would usually end up with the vegetarians getting understandably upset for being shorted, and the meat-eaters using my bathroom in ways that guests should not. (We should do a newsletter about that soon.) I eventually solved this problem by ordering vegetarian pizza for everyone, and if meat-eaters complained I’d just say “but doesn’t the veg look really good?” Also, I just stopped inviting people over because Covid broke me.

Let’s talk about crusts.

Some people like pizza crusts. (I am one of them.) And let’s be clear, I’m talking about standard crusts that are just dough, they’re crispy, they’re wonderful. Not some suburban nightmare crust that’s been injected with cheese. (Seriously. Just order mozzarella sticks if you need more cheese.) But some people do not like pizza crusts. They will collect crusts on their plate like the spoils of war. Bones of vanquished enemies. And that is perfectly ok. What is not ok, is taking the crusts from someone’s plate and eating them, no matter how much you like crusts. In the privacy of your own home? Between partners and/or roommates? Sure, go nuts. But I was once in a social situation where someone reached over to someone else’s plate and just grabbed their crusts. Please do not do this.

Yes, I’ve got some trauma around this. I was raised in a culture where your plate was everybody’s business. From making comments to how much or too little food was on it. To making comments about which things you seemed to be enjoying and which things you weren’t. (No one wants a carrot that’s been boiled for two hours, mom.) To being raised by a father who would toss whatever he didn’t want onto my mother’s plate like it was the bin. Yes, I admit to having trauma around this. But I’m a firm believer that everyone’s plate is their private space, and even the threat of entering someone’s plate airspace should be viewed as a breach of diplomacy, if not outright war.

Also, my dog loves pizza crust. So we’re happy to let him have it. He’s eighteen. He gets to eat what he wants.

Yes, I have strong pizza opinions. For reasons. I grew up in Philadelphia. A shitty slice from a Philly corner pizzeria will always soothe my heart more than a wood-fired pie at some fancy restaurant. And your fancy pie might be amazing, but that shitty slice is touching parts of my heart, and awakening memories of thousands of shitty slices that had to be folded to eat.

When I was in high school there was a pizza parlor across the street. They made a great shitty slice. If I remember correctly a slice was two dollars. I think it was called Bruno’s. Google Maps tells me it’s still a pizza parlor, but the name has changed now. Bruno is long gone, and it’s quite possible that Bruno was gone way before I ever stepped into Bruno’s. It’s quite possible that everyone running the place just inherited the moniker. It’s cheaper to assume an identity than it is to get new signage. We were strictly prohibited from crossing the street and getting a slice during the school day. Which we of course did anyway. School pizza was not as good as Bruno’s. My last forbidden trip to Bruno’s happened during spring semester of senior year. A point at which everyone had long stopped caring about anything high school related, most especially rules that made zero sense. We walked in and ordered our slices, only to hear a voice from the farthest booth call out our names. Not Mike, but Mr. Monteiro, which was always a sign of trouble. Our principal had decided to set up shop at Bruno’s to bust us for going off-campus. He made us sit in the booth with him as our slices were delivered to our table. Slices he happily ate. It was here that we learned truth and power are very different things.

Of all the foods, pizza is the closest to the human heart. Philadelphia has both the best pizza, and the biggest heart. I am being both metaphorical and literal. Every Philadelphia child has walked through a human heart. We have all walked through the giant heart at the Franklin Institute. We are knowledgeable about how it works. We’ve stepped through its valves. We’ve chased our friends through the ventricles. We’ve sharpied our initials in the vena cava. We’ve snuck sloppy kisses in the chambers of the heart. And because we know the ways of the heart, we are uniquely qualified to judge pizza as well.

San Francisco, where I live now, has an uneasy relationship with pizza. I’ve heard it’s something in the water. We have great water, but we apparently don’t have great water for making pizza. And we have a tendency to upscale what doesn’t need to be upscaled. But catch me on a good Saturday, after an afternoon of playing Addams Family pinball, and I’ll stop for a slice at Escape from New York, which is pretty good pizza for San Francisco. It’s too crispy to fold. It’s never quite greasy enough. But if I close my eyes, I can almost make it work.

Traveling back in time to neighborhoods that are long gone, shared with friends who are no longer here, eaten on nights that are long past, when we were all so much prettier, and the world was less awful. Eaten on the still-warm hoods of Chevy Novas. Coming home from punk shows in the basements of abandoned warehouses. Staring out into empty lots of West Philly and North Philly. Watching lightning bugs dance on sticky summer days. And washing it down with a bottle of RC Cola that still has a styrofoam wrapper around the bottle. Wiping pizza grease off our pants. Wondering who was going to eat the last slice.

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