Corn on the Pizza

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

I don’t really understand it.  It doesn’t make sense to me.  I guess those are key words that preface any ethnocentric statement though no matter how one might try to escape its grasp.  Now that might be a good introduction to any short essay for a sociology class but really I am just talking about people putting corn on pizza.  Now you might say that pizza these days is a worldwide food with no one really able to claim it as there own but I would argue that we (Americans) have a right to call it our food.  True, it was the Italians who may have first devised the dish but it was Italian-Americans from New York and Chicago who made it what it is today and it is from expanding American imperialism and globalization that have made it such a world food.  I say this somewhat in my support for my argument (and trying to negate the force of the “ethnocentric” card that people do so often throw out there).  I might win you over a little, I might just be being ethnocentric, you can decide.

So, why do people put corn on the pizza?  There are different levels in this, in what I would call a travesty, mockery, nay, this desecration of the word, Pizza.  Corn?  Really?  I ran into this fetish when I was living in Brazil but it seemed a little more understandable, they produce lots of corn there (especially the region that I was in) and use it in various ways in cooking.  But even that doesn’t negate the sacrilege entirely as I grew up in the States in one of the most corn dense regions outside of Kansas and Nebraska and nobody there ever thought of putting corn on your pizza.  In Brazil though you had to order one of the various “supreme” pizzas (as we would call them) to get the corn, and I only made that mistake once.  So.  Here in Korea it seems to be a completely different story.  They don’t produce large quantities of anything but rice. (I won’t get into the agriculture of the country as I really don’t know all that much, but while you see pears, grapes, rice cakes, and mandarin oranges [from Jeju] you never see ears of corn sitting out for sale.  I haven’t even seen them in the big E-marts.)  So there isn’t that excuse for putting corn on pizza.  And, conversely, you don’t have to order a supreme for you pizza to come laden with corn kernels.  Tut tut, so much worse, as there are no excuses.

So, in a sense there is really no such thing as Pizza.  It is corn pizza.  It comes on everything, as if the two were inseparable here.  I have had Pizza three times here now.  Twice before I was surprised, the first much more than the second, with the corn sitting there peeking maliciously up through the cheese at me.  I thought we had just ordered something that corn was standard on (though I didn’t remember seeing it on the ingredients list), but tonight was the final straw.  I stopped and got a pizza on my way home from work at this little cheap (and Americanized) pizza chain restaurant that a friend had told me about.  I ordered a plain cheese pizza (yep it even said that in English) and what did I find when I got home and cut off the little red ribbon they tie up all the pizza boxes with?  You guessed it, corn.

Plain cheese is no longer plain or Pizza just isn’t Pizza.