Breadsticks (and other pet peeves)

as a surprise, I was taken out to dinner last night by a few friends. Nothing fancy, just Pizza Hut on 21st street...but in the process of chowing down, I came to a few realizations:

My extreme aversion to Pizza (thanks COSI on Wheels) is slowly going downhill. I certainly won't go out of my way to PAY for pizza... (unless it's a BBQ Chicken) , I'm certainly never going to turn down pizza that's free. I dunno, maybe it's that fact that Pizza is so... uncreative... that keeps me from eating it. Seriously, Take a minute and look up the top 10 pizza toppings:

Pepperoni, Cheese, Sausage, Mushrooms, Pineapple, Ham, Shrimp?!, Green Peppers, Onions, Bacon.

Personally, I would have liked to see Cheese separated out into different categories (much in the same way meats were on this list) but that's besides the point. Corporatism has made us think of pizza as just dough, meat, and cheese. And even then, it's TYPICALLY limited to cow's milk cheese, and meat from a pig or a cow. Why not try a sheep or goat's milk cheese on a pizza, how about Duck, Venison, Lamb, or *GASP* Fish/Crustaceans on a pizza? Why be so damn narrow minded when it comes to construction. I find it almost shameful that the most creative things to come out of mass-marketed pizzarias in the past 10 years are stuffing cheese in the crust and--most recently--using Natural (OMG, NATURAL) ingredients.

And then there are the things they choose to serve with pizza.. most notably. Breadsticks. Ugh... Breadsticks. Now, certainly, there's something to be said for simplicity, for food that IS what it says it is. Here we have the lowly Baton de Pain, Palillo de Pan, i.e. the stick of bread. To be a little more concise, I don't HATE Breadsticks (I'll even eat my fair share of them at Olive Garden or an equivalent restaurant), I just dislike the idea or serving breadsticks WITH pizza or pasta for that matter). Again, think about this: what is a breadstick? It's the basal part of a pizza, not rolled out and flatted but instead covered in butter and herbs. Call me a cynic (you wouldn't be the first) but I really think that if Pizza Hut offered a combo involving a drink, order of breadsticks and Pizza w/o sauce covered in butter and herbs... that people would order it en masse? *sigh* are we really in such dire straits that we need to overpay someone to mix flour, water (and perhaps an egg or two) then melt butter over then and put them in the oven?