Celeste Frozen Pizza For One

First off, if you're eating frozen pizza, and you actually consider it pizza, this is not the review for you. The best frozen pizza is still much worse than the worst pizza from a pizza place. To illustrate my point, I will tell you a story. I once had a friend who lived in a bad part of town. Well, it was a good part of town, but the whole town was bad. Not bad in the way you're thinking, though. Most likely, you immediately imagined a ghetto, populated with crack houses, gangs, filled with crime and minorities.
You racist fuck!
No, this was just a shitty, white trash town in Pennsylvania. The pizza parlor was not going to have a really good pie to begin with, that's understood. The people there still thought that what they got there was real pizza, like people in the south or the midwest, or anywhere that isn't north Jersey or NYC. Don't worry, though. That's the last time I'll mention that. Pizza snobbery does not belong anywhere near a discussion about Celeste pizza. I've already given up the high ground long ago.
In fact, this place did have one thing in common with a bunch of pizza places in NYC, in that it was infested with roaches. They took the homage a little too far though. It wasn't like you like you might see one scurrying off in the corner, or knew they were somewhere in the kitchen, but at least out of sight. No, there were roaches running across the counter. They ran over your pizza box as you were paying for it. You had to shoo them off your money when they handed you your change. If you ate your food there, they would run across your plate.
But eat there we did, because it was still better than eating frozen pizza.
Okay, sure we could have just eaten any other kind of food anywhere else, but that's not the point. The pizza place was across the street from his apartment, and we were sort of like dorm room alcoholics back then, so it was the easiest and safest option. Safest option, driving wise, anyway. Healthwise, it was probably as safe as eating somewhere your server was suffering through the advanced stages of the bubonic plague.
It was a different time, as well. There were much fewer options for frozen pizza back then. Trust me, they were truly horrible, probably worse than you can even imagine.
The good news is, you don't have to imagine! That's because there is still Celeste pizza for one available. I suppose Elios is still a thing as well, but let's save that for another time, or better yet, pretend it isn't still a thing at all.
Celeste used to be a big player in the frozen pizza game. It used to be called Mama Celeste pizza, and had an actual spokeswoman named Mama Celeste, who was a stereotype and borderline racist character. The weird thing was, she was a real woman named Celeste, who started out making frozen pizzas before her company was acquired by Quaker Oats, the exact company you would think to go to for authentic Italian pizza. They hired her as the spokeswoman, because somehow they figured that you wouldn't notice the lousy pizza if you thought some old Italian woman was behind it.
She would say "Abbondanza!," which, growing up in an Italian family, I can assure you that no Italian mother ever said when it was time to eat. In fact, it means "abundance" in Italian, which should tell you right there who they were appealing to. There are people who appreciate good cooking, and people who just appreciate a lot of food, whether it's good or a pile of shit, so long as it was covered with cheese.
Mama Celeste used to make all sizes of shitty frozen pizza, but somewhere along the way, corporations started realizing that they could fool people into thinking that frozen pizza might be good. They started to horn in on the market. Stouffers made French bread pizza, which sounds fancy, but is just sauce and cheese on some sliced Italian bread, which in reality was barely better than a stale hot dog roll.
DiGiorno pizza claimed to be as good as delivery, which was a lie, unless you were getting Domino's pizza, which is barely pizza as well, but we'll save that for another time as well.
Then there was Tombstone pizza, whose slogan was "what do you want on your tombstone?" Now I don't know about you, but thinking about my impending mortality did not put me in the mood for pizza. Ironically, eating the pizza did make me think about my mortality, and possibly pray for it later after eating a whole frozen pizza by myself on the couch in front of the TV. I'm not even going to get into the whole cowboy thing from their ad campaign. No one associates the old west with quality pizza.
At any rate, Celeste did what any frozen pizza company would do when faced with a whole bunch of new competition with better quality products. Improve their pizza, you say? Use better ingredients, make a more authentic crust, you might think? No, they gave up, and decided to only sell their same horrible pizza for one product for 99 cents.
Is that so bad? College students need to eat, right? Little kids who have shit taste in food anyway still needed a quick and easy bedtime snack. Teenagers and their friends needed food to fuel their growing bodies while playing video games or watching movies, and who cares how bad the pizza is, because by the time they are teenagers, you hate your fucking kids anyway. The arrogant little eye-rolling pricks deserve shitty pizza, don't they?
You see, Mama Celeste knew she had an edge. The gimmick Celeste had was the little silver cardboard crisping disk that went underneath the pizza in the microwave. You could have a pizza, with a crispy crust, in about two minutes. Who cared if it was horrible?! Two minutes!!! You could go rent a videotape, and watch a movie with an inferior picture and weird aspect ratio and eat pizza in your own home! What an age we lived in!
And that was that. Celeste was happy being a bottom feeder in the world of frozen pizza, and it endured. Through DVDs, and blu-ray, home theaters, streaming services, whatever, that shitty, 99 cent frozen pizza was always there.
But no more. If it was still that same thing, there would be no reason for this review. I would simply assume that you knew what you were getting if you bought one. It would be bad, but familiar, and at least the crust would be crispy. You probably haven't even eaten one in awhile, but you are comforted by the fact that they are still there, and any old Joe who could scrape up a dollar in change and had access to a microwave could still have a small, crisp pizza to warm their stomachs on a cold winter night.
I am here to tell you that Celeste pizza for one no longer comes with a crisping tray. If you look at the box now, it says that the disk is "no longer required." Now, you might think as I did, wow, they've come up with some new, diskless crisping technology!
But no, they just got rid of the disk. I suppose that technically they are right, it is no longer required. You know, if you want to have what is arguably an edible pizza. Without the disk, what you end up with is a soggy, gross crust that may or may not be some sort of low grade foam rubber product. Eating the crust without the crisping tray is like eating a warm but completely untoasted English muffin, that maybe fell in a puddle and was dabbed dry at some point before it arrives on your plate. I mean, you don't make toast in a microwave, right? In fact, it is like tomato sauce and cheese soup on top of the bread your grandmother keeps in the freezer, but swears it's just like fresh bread once you let it thaw. Also, looking back, even "tomato sauce and cheese soup" is really overselling it.
Is this how low we've sunk as a society? Are we willing to just eat something this horrible and accept it? You have to understand, as bad as it was before, without the crisping tray, it's now basically the pizza version of gruel. I thought that the KFC bowls signaled the beginning of the end. I mean, it's a meal all mixed together in a bowl, like a trough. It seemed like that was as low as we could get as a nation.
"Abbondanza!," cried Mama Celeste, which apparently is also Italian for "Hold my beer," and she started selling microwave pizzas without the one redeeming thing that made them appear to be food.
Of course, Mama Celeste is long dead these days, but I'm sure she is fuming as she looks up from hell, cursing in Italian at the suits at Pinnacle foods(who now own the Celeste brand. Yes, I know way too much about it), who decided they could save a few cents by removing the disk.
Because you know that's what it's about. They checked with some focus groups, and decided that the most important feature about their product wasn't taste, or the texture of the crust, it was that it cost 99 cents. They knew that the public would not spend $1.05 on their pizza, even if it meant they had to eat a disgusting, limp abomination you wouldn't feed to prisoners in a Chinese labor camp.
I think that there's a bigger, more disturbing lesson to be learned here. Forget about any political or socioeconomic indicators. Don't bother discussing the rise of racism and hate speech, gun violence or religious extremism. Don't wonder why we are letting the environment get destroyed and why climate change keeps accelerating.
The fact that people are willing to just accept Celeste frozen pizza without the crisping tray tells you everything you need to know about how little respect we have for ourselves; how little we demand of the people in charge. We are a beaten people, flogged into submission.
So next time you go to eat one of these things, and you will, because it's only a dollar and what can you do, take a long hard look at yourself, and how far you've fallen. Look at your Celeste pizza box, and sadly confirm that there is no longer a disk to be found inside, and never will be, ever again.
This is your America.