Why I Don't Eat Frozen Pizzas

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

You can’t wash cardboard.

I work in a cardboard box factory. Largely, as one might expect, we make cardboard boxes. But we also make cardboard inserts that go in boxes to hold products into place, and we make the little cardboard circles that go under frozen pizzas.

The sheet of cardboard that will become a cardboard pizza circle must travel in a truck for quite some distance from the corrugator from which we purchase our cardboard. Then, it is taken off the truck and loaded onto a conveyer belt by a fork lift. The fork lift guy (or gal) cuts the plastic bands that hold the stack of cardboard together, then removes the top sheets that are full of dirt and dust from the journey in the truck.

Once thus prepared, the stack of board is fed onto the “prefeeder”. This is just another conveyor belt which takes the stack bit by bit and spreads it out so it’s easier to see any damaged or warped board so it can be removed. By hand. That’s my job.

Then, the board gets stacked bit by bit into the “hopper”. Metal tampers push against it at regular intervals, squaring it up and making the stack nice and even. The bottom sheet of the stack gets pulled into the machine that has a big wooden “die cut” screwed onto a big metal cylinder which spins around rapidly. The cut has little knives on it which are deceptively sharp. Sometimes, if you bump against one while screwing it on, you’ll bleed a little and not even notice.

These knives cut the board into whatever shaped is desired. In the case of pizza circles, it cuts out circles. The extra bits of board fall onto a scrap belt that clears the waste away.

The board is big enough that four 12-inch circles are cut side by side from one sheet. However, they never get cut out entirely; they’re still connected just slightly at the edges. So, they have to be separated by hand. Then, they have to be packed in stacks of 50 into boxes, by hand.

The same hands of my coworkers who, I’ve noticed, never wash those hands after using the restroom.

2

… and that’s why it’s smart to wash what food you can, and cook the rest to the appropriate temperature. Every single food process has something disgusting associated with it. Every. Single. One.

In the case of frozen pizza, you take the pizza off the cardboard circle and either bake the pizza directly on your oven rack or on a cookie sheet (or baking stone, for that matter) and voila! After even 10 minutes at 425 degrees, and whatever nasties might have transferred from the cardboard to the pizza have been killed.

3

and every molecule of water you drink has been through some organisms digestive tract at least a few million times. So what? You can’t even drown the thoughts away: alcohol is yeast-poop!

Get a grip, and cook well. That which does not kill us makes us stronger. Eat enough fast-food, and we will become invincible!

4

You can have my cold next-day pizza when you pry it from my cold, dead hand.

5

Here, every frozen pizza I’ve ever seen is on a polystyrene disc, shrinkwrapped. I guess the regulations don’t allow them to use cardboard, for the reasons you observe.

6

Following up, after googling…and requesting some cooking physics…will a pizza in a hot oven for 10mins reach the 70 celsius throughout necessary to kill E Coli?

7

Throughout - no. But the surface temperature will be sufficient to kill the little beasties, and that is what the OP was worried about. :smiley:

8

But surely after a few days of being thrown around trucks, fridges, shopping bags, will the beasties not have found there way throughout the food? (Not being obstructive here, just genuinely puzzled)

9

I never eat frozen pizzas, either.

I cook them first. Makes 'em easier to chew.

10

This is why I incinerate people who don’t wash their hands after using the toilet

11

Freezing puts the microbes in a sort of suspended animation-they don’t do much of anything but lie around. It’s only when food is thawed that they start fooling around.

12

Someone more knowledgeable than me will probably come along and answer this, but to my understanding, no, they won’t. Mostly because that’s not how bacteria work. For one thing, they’re microscopic, so they don’t travel far even when they DO decide to move. A journey from the exterior to the interior of any food would take a hell of a long time, longer than individual bacteria would live. And secondly, there’s no real reason for them to move from the surface. They’re there for the eatin’, and there’s plenty of that right where they are.

For example, it’s OK to eat steak rare, but hamburger should always be eaten well-done. The reason for this is that, as meat is butchered, bacteria are introduced to the surface of each piece of meat. By searing the outside of the steak, you’ve killed off all the little beasties that have gathered on the surface. With hamburger, however, the original surface of the piece of meat has been ground into the interior. So you’ve got all the surface nasties rolled into and incorporated into the entire piece of meat. Cook it well-done, and they’re killed off. Anything less, and you run the risk of consuming “live” ones.

13

I don’t eat frozen pizzas because my entire family was killed by a raging horde of frozen pizzas that had escaped from Aisle 7. My family tried to run, but those frozen pizzas were too fast and were wielding filthy pieces of cardboard that they used to beat my family over and over.

What a senseless tragedy.

14

Believe it or not, the OP had absolutely nothing to do with germs. (I don’t usually worry about germs. Even in cases where I should.)

It’s just that from now on, my mind will forever associate the cardboard circle under frozen pizzas with dirt, dust, and the blood, urine, and feces of my coworkers.

That’s not an appetizing thought.

(And the first person to say, “What do you want on your Tombstone?” gets cardboard cut to death. :smiley: )

15

I haven’t eaten a frozen pizza that came with a cardboard circle in years. I thought they was instinct.

16

Um, extinct. The beasties seem to have gotten to my brain anyway.

17

You’d better stop eating all together, BlackKnight.

I worked at a mushroom farm a few years back. We produced nice, sterile-looking enoki mushrooms in shrinkwrapped plastic.

Working in the packaging room was an education. The woman flossing her teeth every day after eating her bag lunch, over a tray of pre-weighted and ready-to-package mushrooms? Small stuff, compared with seeing everyone step out to the Port-O-Let while wearing the hair-nets, smocks, and gloves that are required by Health Canada to ensure food safety.

Wash your produce, kids.

18

You should also swear off Pappa John’s. There’s no difference between their fresh pizzas and the stuff packed in ice. By far one of the worse things I’ve ever eaten.

19

Am I the only one that never associated anything with the urine and feces of my coworkers?
:stuck_out_tongue: [sup]and lived to tell about it?[/sup]

20

I don’t eat mushrooms and I’ve never had a Papa John’s. I’m safe.

(Just don’t tell me anything bad about Mountain Dew or Pop-Tarts. Please. I don’t think I could bear it.)