How Pizzas Are Made, and Why We Like Home Cooking
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 12. 5.08
click on image to go to BBC
I break into tears just looking at the cover of Dayal Kaur Khalsa's classic children's book How Pizza Came To Our Town; if only the reality were as wonderful. Alas, for most people the reality is more like this incredible video from the BBC. I must admit, this Irish Pizza plant is as clean as a whistle, the scene above where they appear to be stuffing some writhing pepperoni octopus into a slicer is the goriest thing I could find. But it is an extraordinary demonstration of how far we have come in mechanizing our food production and taking smelly and dirty real people out of the process of making our food, as they crank out two million pizzas per week.
Watch in amazement at the BBC via Kottke.
Then go to Planet Green and make your own with Hold the Phone! Make Your Own Takeout Food: Pizza
Other Take-out meals you can make yourself from Planet Green:
Hold the Phone! Make Your Own Dim Sum
Hold the Phone! Make Your Own Takeout Food: Make Your Own Vegetarian Pad Thai
Hold the Phone! Make Your Own Takeout Food: Chipotle Black Bean Burritos
Hold the Phone! Make Your Own Onion Rings
Hold the Phone! Make Your Own Takeout Food: Spring Rolls
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I make my own pizza with my great-grandmother's recipes for dough and sauce. I remember the first time I had non-home made pizza somewhere around age 7, and it came as a bit of shock how sweet, thin, round and plastic-y it was. Old Forge Style FTW!
"But it is an extraordinary demonstration of how far we have come in mechanizing our food production and taking smelly and dirty real people out of the process of making our food, as they crank out two million pizzas per week."
It may seem romantic to you to have people slaving away at making pizzas by hand, but that's because you've never worked a 9-5 job in a pizzeria.
It gets very old, very fast.
If machines made pizzas as tasty as humans it would not be opposed to the profession going the way of the Dodo, toghether with other such menial jobs that have disappeared from the developed world(spinning cotton, carding wool, subsistence farming, chimney sweeping, delivering big blocks of ice, the milk man...) and jobs that have overstayed their welcome(e.g. grown men riding around on little bicycles in the rain and hand-delivering brightly coloured paper slips with spam on them).
If I had my choice of a job, I would rather be a pizza maker robot repairman than make pizza all day.
(worked in a pizzeria so know what that is like!) hot and sweaty is very appropriate description.