Honors- Wright Thompson

Best Pizza in the South

In this article, Wright Thompson describes his favorite pizza place.  He describes a little dive in Baton Rouge that started out making small pizzas as an appetizer to soak up beer.  They soon became very popular, so the place increased the size and sold them with different varieties.  Wright talks about how much he loves the place and how when he spent a day with Les Miles, he took 6 of the pizzas to his house.  They were a hit with Les and his family.  The main part of the story is to explain how a little pizza place became so important to him and why he values it so much.

In the article, Wright describes how we all have that pizza place that we want to go back to because no other pizza can compare to it.  Most, if not all, of us have grown up on a certain pizza or tasted a certain one at some point that sets the grading scale for all other pizzas.  We always look forward to the next time we can go back and get more of that pizza.  I think food is such an important part of our culture and background.  We grow up different ways, and I think food is a huge part of the culture we grow up in.  It is very easy for us all to look back at a certain positive time or moment in our lives that is tied to food.  If food wasn’t important to our culture, then why would we categorize it into regions (Southern, Midwestern, East coast, Mexican, Italian, etc.).  We value food greatly in our society, and I like that we do.  It can give a sense of pride in our background and lifestyle.

 

On Whiskey and Grease

(Lost art of the Birmingham hot dog)

This was a great article and video about Gus who worked his whole life in a tiny hot dog shop.  People of all backgrounds came to get his dogs.  He had a secret sauce that nobody but him knew the recipe for.  He bent over the hot dogs so long that his back became hunched.  Gus worked in the shop every day that it was open (everyday in the year except Thanksgiving and Christmas).  He didn’t have a problem with it and he didn’t want to do anything else.  On one of those days in 2011, he worked just as he normally did and then went home.  That night he died in his chair and took his secret recipe to his grave with him.

I love this story an all of them like this one.  It is so cool to see people in a business to just simply give the customers what they want and make them happy.  This story makes me wish I could have tasted one of his hot dogs.  I think personal stories like this almost make food better.  Like I said in the response in the last article, food is important to our society.  In this case, it isn’t to be proud of our background.  It is more about relationships.  People went to this place to see Gus and buy from him.  Also, the article said that people form all different backgrounds come in to get a hot dog.  This make Gus’s shop a gathering spot where people put social groups aside and just come to enjoy life.  So my point is that food is also used to for relationships and to socialize.  It isn’t just nutrients for our body or a meaningful thing from our backgrounds.