It’s 8 p.m. on a Sunday night. You have two papers and math homework, all due at 11:59 p.m. The only thing standing between you and the finish line is hunger. Fatigue, soreness, lack of motivation, all these can be cured by the magic prescription of food. Pulling yourself out of the fog of numbers that have infiltrated your inner thoughts, you lumber to the fridge. Sitting like a cherub on a cloud is a box of pizza, left over from last night’s party. While the thought of eating leftovers straight from the fridge can be downright repulsive, this is not the case with pizza. Instead of taking it out of the box, putting it on a plate and heating it in the microwave, you instead opt to eat it just as it comes.

If you think about it, any other previously warm food — be it pot roast, hamburgers or tilapia — is considered a culinary disaster if it isn’t transformed back into its original state. So what is it, then, that makes cold pizza such a delicacy of the Western world? Cold pizza is not, in fact, a food. It is a lifestyle. It stands as a symbol of who we are as Americans. We live for the weekends, seemingly unable to wait just one more day for those glorious moments of freedom to arrive. We work nonstop to make money, just so we can spend it on whatever frivolous event we have planned for our time away from daily routines.

Americanism is about instant gratification, no matter the cost. It’s about answering to the call of consumerism, constantly whispering in our ear, telling us what to buy and pulling the strings of our puppet lifestyles. In this way, we are all victim to the cold pizza mentality of life. Americans have evolved to thrive off cold pizza. It is a means of returning to our mechanical lifestyles, but we’ve never stopped to realize what it actually is we’re eating. By no laws of food should that soggy crust and rubbery cheese taste appealing, but our innate desire to move forward faster than the pace of ourselves blinds us to the indelicacy of the moment.

How do we free ourselves from the corruption of cold pizza that has permeated our society? By becoming aware of what cold pizza is. Instead of eating the pizza now, we could wait 30 seconds for it to heat up in the microwave. In the same manner, we need to stop and see the world around us. Everything that goes on, from work, to politics, to nature, all of it has meaning. But Americans will never understand each other and the world around them until we give up this life of self-interest. Every time we stop and think about what we’re doing, we heat that pizza up just a little bit. Undoubtedly, if we all did this, we’d become the hottest, cheesiest, best pizza this world has ever seen. So the next time you reach for that damp cardboard box, take time to open your microwave and heat that pizza up.

The world will thank you for it.

Jared Baas is a Weinberg freshman. He can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.