Amanda got a Global Sun Oven for Christmas. I say that not because this post is about her oven (we’ll do that later when we have pics), but because the Sun Oven was the reason we went to Target in Montgomery a couple of weeks ago to buy a frozen pizza.

We had a chance to try out the Sun Oven at Longleaf Breeze on a sunny day, and we needed something to cook in it. Amanda settled on an Archer Farms Spinach & Goat Cheese pizza, paid for it, and off we went. It was only when we got it out to put in the oven that we saw the pizza is imported from Italy. You mean some of the ingredients are imported from Italy? No, that’s not what the box says. The box says the pizza is imported. So somewhere in Italy (the box doesn’t say whether the kitchen is in a sun-drenched grotto in Valpolicelle or a dingy factory in Milan,

the smoggiest city in Europe), some person or machine laid out the crust, poured the tomato sauce “infused with basil and olive oil,” placed the ingredients, put the pizza in a box, and froze it. Then somebody shipped that frozen pizza across the Atlantic Ocean and eventually hauled it in a truck to Montgomery, Alabama so we could buy it. I’m sure there are food practices more goofy than this, but I’m hard pressed right now to recall them. Shipping frozen pizza across the Atlantic? Okay, I get it. When we made the decision to buy this pizza, we validated the very goofiness I’m now condemning and sent the order to Italy to make and ship another one. And if you take a step back, the whole idea of frozen pizza is a little loopy anyway, a curious artifact of an oil-soaked food system that will soon crumble away. And yes, Amanda and I were making a lazy decision, when we could have opted to use local ingredients and make something more remarkable. But still. Shipping frozen pizza across the Atlantic? Weird.