Le Franco Phoney

After some rather dodgy pizza boxes, including this one from Geoff, and this one from me, I bring you the perfect pizza box.

It has everything you want in a pizza box: the idea that your pizza has been made in a wood-fired oven; an aroma that the pizza maker himself is loving; written confirmation, if there was any doubt, that you have a pizza inside this box; and a tasty-looking pizza to get you in the pizza mood while you’re driving back from the pizza shop or paying the deliverer. There are no toothless urchins and no young girls with cleavage in bikinis. This picture has a cartoon feel about it, so if you’re imagining the cartoon man salivating over your pizza, that’s okay too: cartoon saliva isn’t real.

Even better, the size of this pizza box was almost double the size of the last few pizza boxes I’ve had. Its size dictates that the pizza inside is a serious pizza, and not some poor attempt and covering some dough in some canned tomato sauce and hoping it won’t taste too bad.

My rating of this pizza box is a ten out of ten! Have you had a better or worse pizza box experience? Feel free to send me a photo of your loved or hated pizza box and I’ll post it up.

Following on from my remarks on my local pizza box, I received this photo of a Swiss pizza box by Geoff in Switzerland. He wrote:

This is the box they use for pizza round our way. Not as bad as the man with the stick and the young girl, but do I really want to take a pizza from a toothless, homeless urchin? Still, I guess it is Naples, which probably means my wallet is being nicked as I take delivery of the pizza…

So, it looks like France is not solely responsible for weird pizza boxes. I particularly like the guys sitting down behind the urchin’s pizza, almost as if they’re holding it up in a two-dimensional world. And is that a seal that the men on the right are pulling from the water? Or a dead body? At least the pizza is the classic Margherita. They got something right.

Goeff actually found the photo of his local pizza box elsewhere on the web. It turns out that Mike from Zurich put it in a photo album and wrote:

I bought a pizza at my local döner joint because their pizzas come in boxes that have this lovely picture on them. It’s lovely kitsch art.

The ‘artwork’ has also made it onto Photo of the Day on a pizza blog, where it’s described as ’slightly creepy’. My interest in pizza boxes is now starting to match French roundabouts and I’m worrying that perhaps I need to get out more. Speaking of which, lots of photos and information about road tripping through central France will be available just as soon as I can get my hands on the photos.

This is the cover of a catalogue I received in the mail a while ago. It was one of four catalogues advertising gardening equipment, such as ride-on mowers and other goodies for people with big backyards.

The man says: “They reimburse the difference if you find the same thing cheaper!”

The woman replies: “And the goods are ready to be used!”

Now, maybe it’s just me again, but isn’t it a bit odd that a woman in a bikini (with a bit more on display than the ‘up for it’ girl also in a bikini, illustrated on the pizza box my previous blog entry) is relaxing right next to an old man using his gardening equipment in a field by a big shop? Apart from the noise he’d be making, isn’t it just a bit dangerous for her?

So, I asked a French friend about the conversation the two are having. I asked her, before showing her the picture, if you could say something like ‘pret a l’emploi’ (’ready to use’) as a way of saying ‘how about it?’. She said she didn’t think so because it’s how you’d refer to a toy. Then I showed her the picture and she said “ooh la la” (she really did!), and agreed it had been used to infer that the woman is indeed up for it. One of the other lawnmower catalogues featured women in bikinis mowing lawns with big smiles on their tanned faces. So, French gardening catalogues: possibly the only gardening catalogues in the world who feature bikini-clad women who are up for it to entice buyers.

I bought a pizza the other night and the box looked like this:

So, what’s wrong with this picture? Actually, what’s right about it!

1. I’m in a ski resort: where is the seaside and the boat?
2. The girl in the background, still young enough to need a floaty, seems to have cleavage.
3. The girl is also looking a bit ‘up for it’ despite her interest in sand castle building (bucket in hand) and floaty dependency.
4. The pizza man is grinning just a little too happily: I’m guessing he’s just seen the ‘up for it’ girl.
5. Is his pizza stick not just a bit phallic? Especially the way it’s pointing through a gaping hole and towards the girl?

Maybe it is actually a wholesome illustration that some Italian created to truly reflect the happiness of the pizza-maker charged with making my pizza, or to reflect how imaginative a pizza can be or something. Actually, it probably is: a friend showed me a drawing that a little boy did at her work. It had KKK written on it, a man in a white pointy hat, and a green man with wings who was crying. It turns out that the five year-old is not actually up on the Klu Klux Klan: his name is Karl but he can only write the K so far, and my friend had painted his friend’s face green.