Foodfacts.com

A couple of months ago, I read an article on the Huffington Post about Pizza Hut’s big pre-Thanksgiving offer. Hoping that people would not want to cook on that Wednesday, Pizza Hut announced a limited-time variety pack of two rectangular medium one-topping pizzas, eight chicken wings and five breadsticks in a giant box for $19.99. They predicted the sale of 275,000 nationwide, in addition to one million more pizzas.

Personally, I think Pizza Hut’s food is disgusting. The few times I’ve eaten it in my life were usually late nights out of town with friends, where it was seemingly the only option; motel sustenance food, where it was seemingly the only option; or at parties where it was ordered without my knowledge, and seemingly the only option.

In May 2010, I wrote a three-part article on fast food, the catalyst of which was to see just how awful KFC‘s infamous Double Down sandwich was. My mission was to “mine the wastelands of fast food, whose perpetrators serve the most unnatural, chemical-laden, hormone-crammed, genetically modified foods’ to find some, if any redeemable offerings.”

There were only a couple of pleasant surprises. The best I did was to find and report on what I didn’t find terrible, and pit competing businesses against each other to find the lesser evil. I had even stipulated chains with drive-through windows only so as to keep me from Pizza Hut’s offerings.

But recently a friend informed me that the $20 Big Dinner Box was in fact still available, and she’d actually seen one and really wanted my take on it. Eventually I was strong-armed into it via the triple-dog-dare.

Big surprise, it was indeed terrible. But what bothered me the most is that it was in many ways more terrible than it used to be, and not just because I was eating it sober.

I’ll begin with the pizza itself. It goes without saying that you get what you pay for. Though obviously much better, this whole spread would run about double the price at Fultano’s. But I won’t hold it up to that standard. The Pizza Hut pizza is bready and greasy with an insultingly sparse amount of anything else. Dough and oil are the cheapest part of their pizza, and the density fills you up. Sauce is thinly spread, cheese is applied in a patchy dusting, and your one topping is spread far apart. I’ll note that many people enjoy pizza cold or reheated, and neither are an option with this. Cold, the dough is crumbly and stale, while hot, is extremely tough and dense. There’s a 10-minute window after you open the box where the pizza is barely edible.

Wings are tiny and of odd, rubbery texture. We chose the “hot” flavor of the various options, and were offered either ranch or bleu cheese dressing as a side. We went with neither, because none of us ever understood dipping fatty chicken wings in fatty, mayonnaise-based salad dressings, but apparently it’s a common practice.

The breadsticks are just more filler. Spongy, greasy, and dusted with Parmesan, they’re to be dipped in the inexplicably sweet “marinara” sauce. The breadsticks are so greasy they might as well have been fried, and like all fried food, were no good when they cooled down and inedible when heated back up. So the Big Dinner Box failed on all levels.

As I mentioned before, the food is actually worse than it used to be. I remember having Pizza Hut pizza more than 20 years ago at a relative’s house, and it wasn’t bad. I thought maybe it was memory just taking liberties, as it’s wont to do with one’s childhood, so I asked some elders whom I respect for their take. Most all of them agreed that many things, not just pizza, have gone downhill. One man who likes his beers laments that Coors and Budweiser used to taste good, but the brewers began adding more and more rice and less and less of the other ingredients to cut costs, and they did it so gradually that no one seemed to notice. He now drinks microbrews, and claims “a whole generation will never know what they were missing.”

Another person believes that brand recognition and heavy advertising drive sales, not quality. I think price matters too. People’s concept of value isn’t what it used to be. “Fill me up for cheap” seems to be the collective desire of those who patronize Pizza Hut and its ilk. But all agreed that quality has been lowered over the years. McDonald’s used to make their own burgers and fries at each store in the beginning, and they’re now easily the most widely derided chain in the fast food world.

I thought at first it was just older people who griped that “things used to be better,” but now I’ve witnessed it in my own lifetime. The most telling proof of this is the fact that cheapo pizza is roughly the same price it was 20 years ago: $10 to $12 for a large. If the cost of everything else went up in that time, then the quality here has had to go down, and I don’t foresee a lot of disagreement.