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See end addendum for variation of this idea:
Since there are thousands of different toppings, the portions would be very small, maybe the size of a pencil shaving but they’d all be there, from ice cream to sausage to bacon, chocolate, every food available from all cultures on one pizza.
I’d be
curious what it would taste like. I’m guessing only the bravest would try it but everyone watching would be saying “Well? How is it?”
Wouldn’t be for a product obviously being wildly unpractical, thinking more for an experiment. Maybe an episode of a reality cooking show. The process of getting a portion of every available food on Earth might be an interesting challenge to watch in itself.
ADDENDUM: Research project to make an approximation of what all the Earth's foods mixed together would taste like including making a reasonable analog from basic ingredients.
Find the chemicals and elements that make up each of these tens of thousands of foods, their numbers, add them up. Then, knowing what substances we're dealing with and in what percentages, we can make a guess as to what it tastes like "Lots of sodium in mono-food, so it'll taste salty." and even make a reasonable analog to actually eat.
What if it tastes good and is good for you? How interesting would that be?
Model railways and the "Matryoshka Limit"
https://xkcd.com/878/
[hippo, Jan 11 2024]
Here's the toppings list.
https://en.wikipedi...food%20consumption.
I'd leave off fugu though. [doctorremulac3, Jan 11 2024]
Here's a bunch of stuff on taste.
https://en.wikipedi...om%20one%20another.
[doctorremulac3, Jan 12 2024]
Vincenzo knows
https://youtu.be/BA...si=Dusga-S2Nnl9V5ft
Pizza starts here. [minoradjustments, Jan 12 2024]
https://laughingsqu...pizzas-as-toppings/
[pocmloc, Jan 15 2024]
Pizza al taglio
https://en.wikipedi...iki/Pizza_al_taglio
square [pocmloc, Jan 15 2024]
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Wouldn't work, because then this pizza becomes a foodstuff "available on Earth" and must therefore also be a pizza topping. Within a few recursions you'd hit the Matryoshka Limit (see link) |
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Googling the question: "How many foods are there in the world?" I actually got this, somebody actually spent the time to say: |
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"The number of distinct foods around the world is likely in the thousands, if not more. Each region and country has its own unique ingredients, cooking methods, and flavor profiles, contributing to the rich diversity of global cuisine." |
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The world's worst troll couldn't come up with a bigger time wasting non-answer. |
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"Probably really big, like huge, totally not small like a marble or something. So massive it's just like "Whoa!"" |
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On your link, Fugu's fine and I've eaten it. However it's not markedly tastier than any other white fish, but people eat it because it's expensive and dangerous (if not prepared correctly) |
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Well, the amount would probably not be enough to hurt you even if not prepped properly, so I'll put it back. |
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Incidentally, stuff like paste and boogers would not be on the list even if they've been known to be eaten by kids or weirdos, these have to be things you would commonly find in a restaurant and I'd be surprised if any restaurants had those on their menu. |
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"Garcone, how is the boogers and paste pate?" |
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"Magnifique, I picked them special myself!" |
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The taste would be the culinary equivalent of brown. |
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//Incidentally, stuff like paste and boogers would not be on the list even if they've been known to be eaten by kids or weirdos, these have to be things you would commonly find in a restaurant and I'd be surprised if any restaurants had those on their menu.// |
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I define a 'delicacy' as something only eaten in one place, because people everywhere else think it's disgusting. |
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Snails (escargot)
Intestines (offal)
Rotten fish (Surströmming)
Bird spit (bird's nest soup)
Human spit (Kuchikamizake)
Courgette (young marrow)
Human toe (Sourtoe Cocktail)
Brains (various animals, including but not limited to lamb, rabbit, horse, monkey)
Dog meat (people eat dogs in some countries) |
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Okay, gotta be something that isn't disgusting. |
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Gonna have to put it up to a vote. Anything under say... 20% of the population being willing to eat it it's off the list. |
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And if any of that list, rotten fish, dog meat etc gets that 20% vote, raise the minimum number needed until they're gone. |
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Kind of the way government works anyway. Give the right answers or we'll change the questions. |
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By the way, I've had escargot, was actually pretty good but not something I'd do again. They actually serve it in the shell to remind you what you're eating which I kind of appreciate. |
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Don't forget rotten fish (hakarl). However, this is very easy to bake. |
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Make pizza crust. Add cheese and sauce. Flip upside down and set on the ground. Voila, a pizza with everything (on earth) on it. |
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//Make pizza crust. Add cheese and sauce. Flip upside down and set on the ground. Voila, a pizza with everything (on earth) on it.// |
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Okay, but no dessert until you've finished. |
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//gotta be something that isn't disgusting// |
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If you go this way, you will simplify your task enormously by appointing a picky toddler as your arbiter deliciarum. |
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So, just cheese then. And maybe popcorn. And chocolate. |
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You might be able to figure out how this tastes from your desktop without eating anything or going to grocery stores all over the planet. |
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We know what the ingredients to all these are right? |
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You're smart, you can figure out the rest. You would really be able to do this. "Earthfood is 20% sodium, 15% ___. 12% ___ etc therefore it would taste like____" (I won't make the "tastes like chicken" joke) |
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But I do think you could make a reasonable approximation of what earth food tastes like with a few days of research. Think I'll add that to the idea. |
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//We know what the ingredients to all these are right? |
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You're smart, you can figure out the rest. You would really be able to do this. "Earthfood is 20% sodium, 15% ___. 12% ___ etc therefore it would taste like____"// |
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Nope. Our sense of taste and particularly smell (which is most of what we really taste), are evolved to discriminate certain chemical groups quite precisely. For example, two isomers (molecules which have the same atoms and the same chemical bonds between them, but in different physical arrangements, i.e. an atom's connections can be mirrored) can be quite different. |
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For Limonene:
::The two isomers have different odors: l-limonene smells like pine and turpentine and d-limonene has a pleasing orange scent.:: |
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(edit:)
Also, it looks like you put a hell of a lot of salt on your food. |
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If you make a model of anything you can determine the characteristics of any of its parameters. These are just substances. |
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Wouldn’t be easy, but it could be done. |
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You're moving the goalposts. By many miles. before you were talking about percentages of elements.Now you're talking about precise, low level chemical reconstruction of food. |
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//If you make a model of anything you can determine the characteristics of any of its parameters. These are just substances.// |
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So what you're saying is that all you need is a precise molecular breakdown of every (non-disgusting) food, and yes, I concede that's 'all' you need to do.
(Yes, like Voice, I thought your chemical breakdown above implied elemental composition, the only visible component being an element rather than a compound.) |
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However, even if we're just looking at flavour compounds, and disregarding texture, variation etc, I think you will struggle to get data at anywhere near the precision you need.
I mean, assuming you already have a good, reliable mapping of all chemical groups to flavours, then you're looking at, what, MALDI-ToF or something of every food to extract the flavour profile? (Not sure this would discriminate between isomers, but let's disregard that for the sake of argument.) |
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I think I'd call that feasible for halfbakery purposes if both a good, reliable mapping of all chemical groups to flavours existed, and a demonstration of it on something like 5 sample profiles of distinct food items from a database covering... let's say 80% of the worlds cuisine. (At the moment, I don't think either exist.)
Even then, I still wouldn't call it a few days research.
And I wouldn't say it was a good representation without a demonstration that e.g. a coffee connoisseur couldn't tell the difference between a high-end coffee and its reconstituted version. |
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//However, even if we're just looking at flavour compounds, and disregarding texture, variation etc, I think you will struggle to get data at anywhere near the precision you need.// |
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We don't need to be too precise, texture isn't flavor so wouldn't have that as a variable. |
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Might not even need to get too specific, maybe there's something that happens when you have every flavor available mixed together like when you mix every color together, the senses just see grey. Like you said: //The taste would be the culinary equivalent of brown.// That sounds pretty plausible. |
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Or maybe it defaults to "tastes like chicken". Dunno. |
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How about starting small, what's the food with the most different ingredients? Taste receptors in the mouth sense the five basic tastes: sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and savoriness. Somebody has to have mixed these all together somehow, I'm sure I'm not the first one to think about this. |
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So that would be the way to start, mix sweet, sour, salty, bitter and savory whatever that is. Can't I just go to the candy store and buy something over the counter that hits all of these? And what the hell's "umami"? |
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I'd like to see a liquid version served to wine connoisseurs who show off by talking about flavors in way too much detail. Blow their minds with this. |
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"Okay, I've got hints of gopher with an air of haggis, but am I sensing a strong angular backbone of squid?" |
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Good heavens! We call anything on a flat crust a pizza. Or a risen bread. French bread pizzas? Deep dish? Overloaded boats of vegetables, meats, fruit, pineapple (good lord), just anything at all. WRONG! You don’t eat it with a knife and fork. It’s a wedge so it folds elegantly into the ideal edible form. |
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Call it something else, for god’s sake. We don’t call a grilled cheese sandwich ‘toast.’ Give these so-called pizza variants their own name or you end up like Taco
Bell; anything is a taco now. Anything is NOT a pizza! Go to Sally’s in New Haven and experience ‘apizza’ as they call it. The real deal. So different from the chain stores and so much better. Not in the same food universe. (link) |
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Hey, when they decided to put pineapple on a pizza and still called it pizza they shredded the rule book. |
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And sprinkled it on a piece of bread and called it a pizza. |
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And as much as I love Chicago, their deep dish "pizza" is not pizza. It's a bowl of cheesey bread mash soup. |
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The link looks amazing. Next time I'm out that way I'm going there. |
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[doc] The problem is that only a small percentage of flavor actually occurs on the tongue. You're right that mixing a certain number of basic tastes would cover that. But most of flavor it is scent based. The human nose is really remarkably sensitive in it's ability to differentiate between extremely closely related organic compounds. You are talking, likely, hundreds of thousands of different compounds, many of them not actually identified, in order to replicate all possible flavors. |
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So we don't need to just consider chemical makeup, we need evaporative qualities as well? This is getting complicated. But kind of interesting as well. |
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So back to just making a pizza out of every food on Earth then. |
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//We don't need to be too precise, texture isn't flavor so wouldn't have that as a variable.// |
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I /did/ say I'd consider the case without it... but since you flat-out reject it as a factor I'd like to point out that this was extremely generous.
I mean - you want it for a /pizza/ - a food item in which texture is I think quite important. If you disagree, please perform the following experiment: |
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Buy or make a pizza with toppings of your choice. Also acquire a tasty beverage (water is acceptable).
Put a slice of the pizza and half the drink in a blender; blend until smooth.
Try a bit of your pizza in both forms, and evaluate how much you appreciate the pizza slice and drink vs its combined form, the pizza soup. |
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I hear what you're saying, but, not to be gross, doesn't it turn into "pizza soup" after you chew it? Pizza mush anyway. |
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But okay, textures etc might be a factor, but with each sample being the size of a fingernail clipping, wouldn't that sort of average out as well? |
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Well I guess you'd only sense the crunch stuff. |
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[doc] 2 different spots right near Yale. Sally’s and Pepe’s. Cousins who fell out a hundred years ago but make the same recipe. The family tanked but the ‘apizza’ survived. I knew Sally’s when it was the only Sally’s; now it’s a chain. Pepe’s is still obstinately servicing New Haven exclusively. Check the pics on their site. |
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Update: the current reviews don’t reflect my experience of 40 years ago. I hope it holds up. I’ll try again if I get the chance. |
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I will absolutely go there. I wanted to take the family out that way so see Vermont, New Hampshire and Main, 3 of the 4 states I've never been to, but I want to then head down to New York through Connecticut in case those states were boring. I'll take the fam to one of those and report on the current state of pizza there. |
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[Loris] you might be defying the definition of pizza there. I propose that your experiment should only razz the toppings into a paste, and then spread them onto the base. |
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//I propose that your experiment should only razz the toppings into a paste, and then spread them onto the base.// |
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In one sense, I guess you're right - to make a strictly fair comparison between an "everything pizza" as originally described, with a small flake of every food as topping, and a blended version of the same - yes, topping paste would be a minimal adjustment. |
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But I was actually thinking of the experiment as illustrating a different point: - does blending a /single/ meal change the experience of eating it?
To put it another way, I could take a small representative sample of, say, a stir-fry - a slice of pepper, a small floret of broccoli, a cube of carrot a few peas and a couple of noodles, all fried - and give it to someone, and they'd appreciate the distinct components and textures. Same stuff, but blended, and it's a different experience, I'm pretty sure. |
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I'm not saying that's /bad/, just that we have to acknowledge the simplification. |
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I think that would be interesting to check the distinction between separate and blended ingredients, as long as you didn't call it "paste". Maybe something French sounding, like "fluorascenteu" that doesn't sound disgusting. |
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OK I have a category question here. |
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//Everything// is too all-encompassing, and leads logically to [MechE]'s solution of placing the pizza base face down on the floor. If you object that //everything// has to be on top of the pizza base and not underneath it, then simply post the pizza base to New Zealand and get someone there to place it face down on their floor. |
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//every food available from all cultures// could also be pedantically interpreted to mean the net total edible matter in existence, however that would be physically impossible to separate from the terrestrial substrate so we can dismiss that interpretation. |
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I think we have to parse the specification to mean a small representative sample of every edible substance. This interpretation is backed by the naming of complete food products such as //from ice cream to sausage to bacon, chocolate// which rules out the molecular interpretation |
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(as an aside, if we allow the molecular interpretation which I think we don't since it seems to complicated, then we should also allow the atomic interpretation which merely requires a periodic table sample kit to be sprinkled on the pizza dough) |
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Anyway my question is the granularity or specificity of what counts as a //different// topping. Is vanilla ice-cream different from chocolate chip ice cream? Is chocolate flake ice-cream different from chocolate chip ice cream? Is vanilla frozen yoghurt different? What about vanilla yoghurt (not frozen)? How about vanilla greek (strained) yoghurt? Vanilla low-fat yoghurt? Vanilla-flavoured yoghurt dessert? Would bourbon vanilla count as a different topping ingredient from Mexican vanilla, Tahitian vanilla, West Indian vanilla, or synthetic vanillin, Leptotes bicolor, or castoreum? What about the method of curing, e.g. heating in hot water, freezing, or scratching? What about pure cream ice-cream, reconstituted from dried milk ice cream, what about ice cream with added vegetable oils? What about if the milk is from Jersey cows or Frisian cows? What about if the cows are organically fed, grass-fed, or indoor feedlot-fed? If the milk is from one dairy or blended from a co-operative? Pasteurised, thermised, or raw milk? etc. |
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Also [hippo] the recursion can be easily solved in the final step of preparation, by folding a corner of the almost-completed pizza over, so that the pizza is then on top of itself, i.e. it is a self-topping pizza. |
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No because I was referring to a tiny corner not 50% |
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I suppose that's easier than making a pizza in the shape of a Klein Bottle |
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Poc, I think the best way to approach this would be to use it to create an analog model with compromises in what's considered "food", such as milk from different cows not being delineated, the ice cream being the top 5 flavors etc. With the ice cream for instance, you could easily have 100 flavors right off the bat, and you've only picked one food. |
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Might be better to have a "flavor spectrum" where you pick a few items from "sweet, sour, savory" etc. |
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But first, the question in my mind remains: what's the closest we have to this now? I'm sure some crazy chef at some point put every ingredient into his experimental... something at some point. |
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Does this pizza contain antimatter? Anti-neutrons? Aunti-Em? |
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//you pick a few items from "sweet, sour, savory" etc// So, Cherry tomatoes, pickled capers, and mozarella cheese. If you only pick a few items, you are hardly doing //everything//. |
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Similarly, //compromises// are basically cheating your way out. |
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//pizza ... are square// Its my understanding that some regional Italian traditions make square pizzas as the norm. but I was thinking that a corner of any shape of pizza including a circular one could be similarly turned over. |
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I was thinking about the food representation question before, and I think there's a number of options which don't involve compromising the comprehensiveness of the coverage. |
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One way would be to get an estimate of the consumption of each food type as a fraction of the total, and include representative samples in proportion to the total. I think this is closest to the spirit of the idea, although you still need to decide if that's by calories, by weight (wet or dry), or normalise each region's contribution to get a per-head proportion (like, say Americans eat twice as much food per head as Africans on average, do you scale their contribution down or not) or what else.
There are of course other 'sensible' ways of doing the calculation, depending on what you're looking for. If you wanted to maximise diversity, you could take the log of the total for each food - this may make sense if you discovered the topping was mostly rice, for example. |
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The other thing which bugs me is that a pizza has a significant fraction of base - that is, bread, tomato and possibly cheese (depending on where you think the topping starts).
And then a lot of people eat food with bread, tomato and cheese in, so they would be represented in the topping too.
So, you could try to extract foods which are largely bread, tomato and/or cheese from the topping list, and also make the base according to the same strategy. |
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This has become a logic conundrum, asking "what do all of the world's foods mixed together" opens an entirely new set of questions. |
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Maybe it can be reframed as the new Shrodenger's cat like paradox: A question that creates a question that creates a question. |
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Sort of like a kid who keeps saying "Why?" |
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"Why is the Earth round?" |
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"Because when the gasses it formed from were pulled together by their mass that was the most even shape reflecting those gravitational forces that were pulling equally in all directions." |
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It's recursions all the way down/up ! |
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Favourite quotes from the discussion so far: |
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'Not in the same food universe'
(response: more of a backstage waiting area) |
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'[you've proven pizza] pie are square'
(response: R 0. Pi R round, O S A R!) |
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'tastes like chicken'
(response: proposed as the base taste of protein in Universe 1.0) |
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Douglas Adams' famous detective Dirk Gently is quietly finishing the pizza while we are distracted by argument. |
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I'm just tripping on how this dumb idea got sort of interesting. |
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Zero Pizza - Pizza with nothing on it. |
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There's a video on YouTube where a guy wins 10k dollars by ordering a nothing pizza. It's a race between delivery companies and of course a nothing pizza takes less time to prepare and bake. |
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Zero pizza is easy, but negative pizza is more challenging |
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Maybe it's topped with a pure laxative / diuretic mixture? |
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