a pizza eating feat for the ages (link)
11.1.09 - slice - by daniel zemans

pizza may have become a staple of many americans' diets, but i have a love-hate relationship with it. growing up, whether it was ellio's or a regular pie, i ate a ton of it. from evenings where my mom was working & my dad had to make dinner to pizza parties at school & birthday parties at chuck e cheese, i ate it at least once or twice a week. at some point in the last few years though, because i'd eaten so much of it over the years, i sort of became sick of it. i still have a slice or two every once in a while, but those times are few & far between & when i do eat pizza, it's usually at someone else's urging.

some people never grow sick of pizza though. take chicago's craig scharoff. as slice (serious eats' pizza blog) reports, back in september, scharoff made a claim that he loved pizza so much that he could eat it every day for the rest of his life. his business partner challenged his claim, offering up a "four-figure sum" if he ate nothing but sausage pizza for every single meal during the month of october. over the past month, the pizza-eating drama has been playing out on LTH forum, a "chicago-based culinary chat site" & as slice notes, it really was no challenge, as scharoff "made it clear by the middle of october that he was an unstoppable pizza-eating force."

this past saturday marked the final day of the sausage pizza-eating challenge & since he passed the test with flying colors, he's now a little bit richer. in addition, "he never felt sick the entire month and, as of october 29, he lost 6 pounds since the challenge began." what's even more nuts is that he claims that "he could do another 30 days if not for all the pictures and documenting he had to do." in fact, according to slice, "tonight, this great man, this pizza-eating machine, this hero to us all...tonight, he plans to eat pizza."

how america eats has changed; snacking is the new meal (link)
07.30.09 - the register herald (beckley, wv) - by john blankenship

straight out of brooklyn, the $5 slice (link)
07.30.09 - the ny times - by manny fernandez

sorry for the nosh nook delay, folks. yesterday morn was a little off the normal schedule for me. i was planning on heading to liberty park for the all points west fest (more on that debacle to come later), so in order to leave work at a reasonable enough time, i planned to get into work at the SHOCKINGLY early time of 9:30. when i woke up yesterday morn to pen a nosh nook about john blankenship's thursday piece about how america's meal habits are becoming more snack like, i came across this OTHER ny times article & decided i just had to write about that instead...so i waited on it til today. plus, it's the 100th edition of the nosh nook so i like to be happy with the pieces tied to randomly important sounding numbers. i know...excuses, excuses.

so this times article by manny fernandez focuses on di fara pizza, a new york legend located in the midwood neighborhood of brooklyn & run by a 72-year old guy who only uses ingredients flown in from italy. they recently raised the price of a slice to $5, which is a big deal to a lot of people because as fernandez notes, "the price of a slice has long been one of the city’s unofficial economic indicators." even bloomberg's had something to say about it. “the real question, relative to the local economy, is whether people are trading up from a $2.75 slice or down from a $25 entree, and from what i hear in the subways and on the streets, it’s probably a mixture of both. but if you’ve ever had a really great slice of pizza, you know there are worse deals.” ok bloomy, we get it. you ride the subways like us regular folks.

a mother of a friend of mine works somewhere in the public sector in a job that has something to do with the city economy, so they contacted her for this article. she let them know that they should contact her son, who i've heard rave about di fara at least once a week for months now. while he didn't provide an official comment, he told his mother to tell them that "hell yeah it's worth it." i haven't tried it yet myself, but don't see anything wrong with paying $5 for a slice if it rules that hard. anyway, the times article looked at it from a slightly different angle (more with the ties to the greater economy), but it's a topic that the ny post already reported on way back on monday, so i wonder if some scooping happened here. mmm...scooping.

new pizza hut iphone app cuts out strenuous phone ordering (link)
07.16.09 - the inquisitr - kim lacapria

the wait is finally over! as i mentioned a few weeks back, the big pizza chains are getting all giddy about technology & as such, are developing viral campaigns, social networking tools & iphone apps, all designed to marry the wonders of technology with the excitement of ordering crappy pizza.  pizza hut is leading the iphone race with the release of their new iphone app, "ihut," which, according to their demo video, is "the killer app for your appetite." the boys in creative must've spent hours on that slogan.

i wanted to test out the app for myself, so yesterday, whilst sitting at the airport, i downloaded it & fired it on up.  for starters, to do anything but play the "pizza hut racer" game that's part of the app, you have to go to the pizza hut website & create an account.  it turns out that you can't even create an account from their mobile site, so my plan for ordering up a large pie with the works & having it delivered to gate C12 (isn't that an explosive?) were foiled.  i kicked ass at the racing game though...a time of 1:22 and only three collisions with pizza boxes, one with a pan pizza & another with a thing of wings.

luckily, kim lacapria of the inquisitr (can i buy an "o" please?) has put together a rundown of the ihut app's benefits.  it's mainly designed to let hutskateers virtually place orders via interactive options that allow you to resize pizzas, drag & drop toppings and sauce your wings with a shake of the iphone.  you can't go too far though.  as the pizza hut press release for the app explains, "if an overeager pizza customer adds too many toppings, the pizza explodes and toppings go flying across the screen with an alert to make their pizza happier with fewer toppings." how fun! on top of ordering & playing racing games, there's a "virtual fridge" with coupons on it, so you can pay less for your crappy pizza.  lacapria thinks it's nice & all, but notes that she's "a born and bred New Yorker- if someone didn’t swear at you while you ordered it, it ain’t a pizza, dude." for the record, in my eight years in nyc, i've never been sworn at whilst ordering a pizza...sounds like ms. lacapria brings out the worst in people.