The faux outrage that conservatives trot out whenever there's a new rule limiting the poison gas we're no longer allowed to breathe has become a pretty dull blade. They're coming for our gas stoves! (Not really.) Our cow farts! (Nope.) The latest target of the incredulous anger cycle—our beloved coal- and wood-fired pizzas! (No, actually, not at all, as the great climate change newsletter Heated points out.)
The New York Post has been on an almost-48-hour tirade against changes to the City's air quality rules (which would merely limit the particulate matter that workers and customers would have to breathe), and turned up the heat to such a degree that Elon Musk has weighed in and a different transphobic, racist asshole tossed a bunch of pizza slices over the fence at City Hall. Taking a break from their obsessive, slightly pervy chronicling of a middling lady golfer, the Post manufactured a story designed to foment outrage and served it up, oozing with cheesy details—coal-fired pizza, New York's beloved speciality, endangered by government overreach!
It's boring and predictable and deeply, deeply stupid. But there's another question I would like to pose, which is: Who cares? Because coal-fired pizza is not New York pizza. Coal-fired pizza is a) bad overpriced pizza and b) the pizza of tourists who hire a line sitter just to get into a place that's on TikTok.
True New York pizza is not coal-fired. It's the classic flat circle, oozing with a substantial top-layer of cheese and creamy tomato sauce from a can. It is shoved, with force and grace, to the back of a gas-fired (or electric, who cares) stove; left to sit for an indeterminate amount of time; removed at the mysterious whims of a sweaty guy with a big paddle; and then reheated ceaselessly under a lamp before it is finally cut into slices, which are then returned to the oven for their final heating. There is no coal or wood involved.
Di Fara's, Joe's, Spumoni Gardens—none of these use coal or wood. Sure, there are some "classic" NYC joints that do, but is that really NYC pizza, or is it some third, more expensive option for people who have too much time on their hands?
This is the latest crime committed by the New York Post—trying to make us think coal-fired pizza is somehow special. It is not. It is simply another (wrong) way to make pizza.
