There are a lot of reasons you could be carrying a partially eaten pizza on the bus at eight o’clock in the morning. As you probably know, pizza is just as good right out of the fridge after a big night or as French toast the next day—definitely no judgement here when it comes to early morning pizza.
But once you’ve committed to transporting an entire pizza in a box—on public transit—you have an obligation to that pizza and to whoever made it; a duty to maintain the structural integrity of your pie.
Videos by VICE
If that means pushing through the subway platform with an arm fully extended, so be it. Give the pizza box its own seat on the subway? Sure, we’ll look the other way. Pass out and leave your unattended pizza to slowly slip out of its “Fresh Pizza” box and wither away on the subway floor? Nah, brah. Not cool. But that was the fate of one such pizza in London last week.
The sadness of this big, neglected pizza was not wasted on BBC reporter James Longman who snapped a photo the scene unfolding before him and posted it on Twitter, with the insightful caption, “Big night (it’s 8am).”
Clearly, we’re not the only ones who were appalled by the treatment of this pizza. As the post climbed beyond 57,000 likes and 22,000 retweets on Twitter, so too did the outpouring of anger toward the woman whose pizza met its demise on the floor of a train cart. In fact, the post got so much traction online that Longman even floated the idea of finding and crowdfunding a new pizza for Fresh Pizza Lady. No word on that yet.
Longman’s photo is a rich, puzzling image, which ultimately leaves us with more questions than answers. Why is this unnamed woman would be passed out at 8AM on the train with a pizza? Was she coming? Or going? Sure, it’s normal to nod off in the morning during a smooth train ride, so why not put the pizza beside you? Why three colours of nail polish?
But, in the end, it doesn’t really matter. This woman had a responsibility to keep her Fresh Pizza as fresh as possible, and ultimately she failed.
