Screw it, I'm cutting my own pizza!

For two consecutive nights people have ordered deliveries and given explicit instructions not to cut the pizzas. It seems they want to eat them like big sloppy cookies. Who needs pieces anyway? I like that kind of outside-the-box thinking. It's very mind-expanding.

Actually, I'm sure it was for religious reasons -- they didn't want anything touching their pizzas that wasn't an authorized Hindu topping that can be reincarnated into later, like a cow or a pig. But why all of a sudden two of these peculiar orders in two days? This had never happened before, to my knowledge. Was there a suggestion in American Hindu Magazine or something? Are they getting the same memo from somewhere? Is there a Hindu message board that all Richardson, TX Hindus check? Is it one of those avant-garde performance-art things that they are doing just to see if anyone notices? The mind boggles.

Am I being insensitve by noticing this pattern and wondering about this?

I will give them credit for a good idea, though, because those pizza cutters don't get washed as often as they probably should, and they all have some sort of grease/meat residue on them. Of course, if you're going to get hung up on not eating meat, you should probably avoid eating out altogether, because the pizza cutter is really the least of your worries. Put it this way: The average age of a cook at a pizza place is about 17. The average state of those cooks is drunk-to-high. The average level of concern they display for possible religious issues when making pizzas is none at all. That's right. And karma's a you-know-what.

All this brings to mind a Papa John's story from about 2 years ago. I delivered a veggie pizza to an Indian student at UTD, and when I got back to the restaurant I was told that I have to go back and take them another pizza. It seems that when I was on my way back, the customer had called the manager and said there was something disturbingly "fleshy" on the pizza. The manager asked what it was, and the customer didn't know, but it sure was"fleshy". He kept using that word. I took him a second pizza that passed his inspection, and he gave me the old pizza back and showed me the piece of flesh he was so concerned about. It was a mushroom.

I don't know that this story says anything conclusive about Hindus, India, Indira Ghandi, or the virtues of meat avoidance. I just know that I had steak yesterday, and it was fleshtacular.