Fetish Pizza

Recently, two consumer fast food product items have reached such heights of corporate desperation and cynicism, that I can no longer remain silent.

They are, respectively, Taco Bell's Crunchwrap Supreme, and Pizza Hut's Cheesy Bites pizza.

Let's start with the Crunchwrap, "America's second-favorite one handed pastime." My brother said it best: "Dear god, it's a melange of the entire Taco Bell menu, fried up into a hell frisbee." Sib, you have likely hit on the exact corporate Crunchwrap blueprint; expect a humorless call from TB HQ. The Crunchwrap, by my estimation, is likely made as follows: one scoop of prep table leavings, straight from the Hefty bags. Place in center of tortilla and mash in edges. Plunge into deep fryer. Sell to fools.

Only the talking sauce packet campaign rates lower in my overall ranking of pathetic moves by TB HQ.

On to Pizza Hut.

First, I must disclose that, long ago, I myself was once possibly employed for three years by the 'Hut as a telephone operator, deep in the windowless bowels of a Central California office park**. In this capacity, I was impelled to hawk "Land Before Time" hand puppets, which were rubbery, condom-scented dinosaurs with giant holes in their posteriors, intended for a human hand. "Suggestive selling," it was called, and if you were caught not doing it by a corporate phone spy, it was curtains for you. Thus I am personally acquainted with Pizza Hut's marketing world view, and should in no way be shaken by the absurdity of a product such as the following.

And yet: just when I thought my exasperation with Pizza Hut's unholy crust mutations had run itself aground, here comes the addition of the "Cheesy Bite," essentially a tacked-on Pupperoni dog snack of dough and cheese.

To be fair, it is no secret that Pizza Hut has been tampering with the basic pizza blueprint for years, say, injecting crusts with syringes of Velveeta, or entombing entire pizzas in the bellies of yet larger, meta pizzas. We can only speculate that The Cheesy Bite is based on Pizza Hut's ironclad consumer research, indicating that America's appetite for surgically altered fetish pizza rises unabated.

**This story, being that it qualifies as a snippet of my unpublished memoirs, may or may not be entirely based in fact, but rather hail from the mists of emotional truth.