Today’s assignment was to pick a particular food we eat and
research it. I chose my favorite
food, my dad’s homemade pineapple pizza.
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| The secret ingredient to make the best pizza ever. Photo found at pictureshunt.com |
There are four main ingredients in pineapple pizza: dough,
sauce, cheese, and pineapple. The
dough is made from scratch. It is
flour-based, and my dad uses quick-rise yeast so we can have pizza in one day
instead of two. The sauce he uses
is Ragu pizza sauce which is made out of tomato puree (water, tomato paste),
soybean oil, salt, spices, and natural flavor. They do not list exactly what spices are used or what the
natural flavors are. The last two
ingredients: cheese and pineapple, are pretty self-explanatory.
The Ragu pizza sauce was made with California tomatoes. The Gold Medal flour comes from wheat
made in America. Gold Medal buys
the wheat for their flower from family farms across the nation, but it has to
be from a clean crop to make it past their inspection. The cheese, from the
Precious brand, was made somewhere in the US. The website only mentions that the company is based in New
York, but 50% of the packaging is made from plant-based renewable
resources. The Dole Pineapple was
grown and packaged in Hawaii. At
the Dole Plantation, all pineapples are planted by hand and are watered with
irrigation. There are no mentioned
pesticides or hormones mentioned.
Natural is considered the best way to raise them
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| The only ingredient in my pizza that is sure to have come from California. Photo found at amazon.com |
So, all the ingredients come from larger manufacturers, but
Gold Medal and Ragu purchase their ingredients from smaller farm
businesses. In the case of Dole
and Precious, it is mostly the large corporations themselves who benefit
economically. This probably hurts
smaller farm businesses and many local farmer’s market. On the other hand, Gold Medal and Ragu
sales economically benefit both themselves and the smaller farms they purchase
from, because the more they sell, the more they can buy locally.
The environmental impacts of the ingredients of my single
pineapple pizza by itself isn’t too bad, but added up, the total becomes a
lot. The can of pineapple, part of
a much larger shipment, would have to get to the mainland either by ship or
plane. The cheese could have come
from any of the 50 states in America, and the same is true of the wheat for the
flour. The only ingredients that
absolutely wouldn’t have had to travel far are the tomatoes from the Ragu pizza
sauce since those were grown from California. Together, that would add up to a lot of fuel being used,
which means more green house gas emissions and more drilling for oil.
However, there are a few saving graces to some of these
products. The Ragu jar and Gold
Medal flour package, once emptied and cleaned out, could be recycled. And as aforementioned, Precious makes
its packaging out of 50% renewable plant-based products. Although not perfect set ups, they are
steps in the right direction.
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| There is at least one serving from each level of the food pyramid on the pizza. Photo found at nal.usda.gov |
As far as pizza goes, homemade pineapple pizza is fairly
healthy. My dad makes it with a
thin crust, so you don’t consume huge amounts of starch. He puts on enough pineapple chunks to
equal two servings fruit for a day.
Cheese, a dairy product, is also good for you as long as you don’t eat
too much of it. And there’s none
of that grease on the pizza that restaurants like to glob on. The only thing that’s kind of iffy is
the sauce, because it’s base is tomato paste, because the further something
gets from it’s original state, the less nutritious it is. However, it’s not exactly bad for you
either. The pizza sauce as only 2%
of your daily fat intake and 10% of your daily sodium intake, but it also as 6%
Vitamin A and 2% Vitamin C and Iron per serving size.
Sources Used:
Ragu.com
Goldmedalflour.com
Dole-plantation.com
Preciouscheese.com
