What Should Legally Be Allowed On A Pizza

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published September 8, 2025] 2025

I'm pondering how it is even possible that in sixteen years and 570 columns, I've never written an entire one about pizza. More specifically, what should legally be allowed on top of one.

I'm from the Northeast where people actually know how to make pizza. You'd think that given how many easterners have migrated west in search of better weather that they would have brought pizza-making skills with them. But this is not true.

It's always an issue every Christmas when the extended family, including my daughter-in-law's Connecticut parents, congregate at my younger son's home in L.A. for the holidays. In combining traditions of both families, the Christmas Eve menu is pizza, which is how my daughter-in-law's family always did it.

I am sure Los Angeles has actual pizza. But the stuff that's delivered - some eight boxes - is nothing I would recognize. My daughter-in-law's mother and I always peek into the boxes hoping in vain that this year something with red sauce and nitrates will appear. But it never does. We both shake our heads and mutter, "Surely they have real pizza in this town?"

What does show up are pizzas with white sauces and vegetables that in my view should be legally enjoined from topping a pizza. These include broccoli (especially), kale, and large portobello mushrooms. I would almost (please note I said almost ) eat a ham and pineapple pizza than these.

I've never quite understood the appeal of a ham and pineapple pizza yet there are obviously persons who eat them. I worry about these people.

Of course, one could always remove the broccoli and kale and portobello mushrooms from the top but we fear that underneath is simply a gluten-free crust. Or god forbid, cauliflower. The desecration of pizza seems to have no limits.

Now, in full disclosure, I should mention that one of my husband Olof's and my many compatibilities is our fondness for anchovy pizza. It is becoming harder and harder to find at pizzerias, likely pushed out by all those cauliflower-crusted broccoli abominations.

People will not let you have anchovies on just your side of a pizza, insisting it contaminates theirs. And in truth, they are correct. So if you want an anchovy pizza, you have to marry someone who also likes it. It's its own love language. 

Every year on our June wedding anniversary, we order an anchovy pizza to be delivered to our front yard, where we sit and enjoy the sunset and excessive sodium intake. At our age, we're not really supposed to ingest an entire years salt allotment in one sitting. But we do.

Our kids rudely refer to our love of an anchovy pie as a "bait"  pizza. But then, they're the kind of people who put kale on theirs. Both of them. I sometimes lie awake at night wondering where I went wrong. Well, other than raising them in California.

When I was growing up on the east coast, anchovies were a not-uncommon ingredient in restaurant food, especially Italian. Their popularity does not seem to have survived the crossing of the Mississippi.

When you order a Caesar salad here, the anchovies are optional. Um, excuse me, but they are NOT optional. It's what makes it a Caesar salad. When the waitress asks if you want anchovies, she is shocked if you say yes. She asks you a second time because she has already written no on her order pad.

I should also mention that when we lived in Sweden, we experienced a cultural variation of fish pizza that surprised even us. We ordered a crayfish pizza one night and got a pizza with an actual entire crayfish, beady eyes and all, on top of it. We like to think it was already dead.

It is a testament to how much pizza has evolved (some would say devolved) that a few years ago, one of the airlines that we use notified both my husband Olof and me that we would have to strengthen our passwords on our mileage accounts and select new security questions.

Olof and I hate security questions. For virtually all of our accounts financial, travel, etc. we try to have security questions that we would both know the answer to. City where we were married (La Jolla) is always a good choice, although this is actually both of our second marriages so even that one has potential for confusion. We always go for Olof s first pet. City where you were born has at least a 50% chance of being correct. We never use grandmother s maiden name since neither of us can remember our own much less the other person's.

But with this new system, the airline offered fifteen security questions of which we were required to pick five and select answers from a pull-down menu. It goes without saying that if either of us, but especially Olof, has to prove identity to this airline with the answer to any of these questions, he'd have to take the bus back from Chicago.

There was not one single question of the fifteen that we would both know the answer to. That is because the airline outsourced this project to pod people from a parallel galaxy who have not visited Earth in any recent time-space continuum.

To be accurate, there WAS one question that I knew we'd both know the answer to without a single doubt: What is your favorite pizza topping? Woo-hoo! Anchovies! But were anchovies one of the options? Nope! A Middle-Eastern spice called Za'atar was an option, as was mashed potatoes. On a pizza? Even something called "giardiniera"  which sounds like an intestinal disease you get from camping. But no anchovies.

But back to Christmas. Fortunately Christmas Eve dinner ends with another tradition from my daughter-in-law's family: sinfully chocolatey brownies oozing with homemade hot fudge and topped with peppermint ice cream. I've never taken heroin but this is how I'm guessing heroin makes people feel. Your endorphins are in overdrive. And you forget all about that nasty pizza that you have been slowly feeding to Teddy and Tizzy (the dogs). They seem to like it, but normally all they get is kibble. I rest my case.

Crayfish pizza in Stockholm