People Heating Up Lunchables Pizzas Deeply Upsets Me
Last night I stumbled upon something very troubling. It was a TikTok video of a young woman constructing a Lunchables pizza. It started totally fine. She took out the dough disk, lathered it up with that delicious, watery pizza sauce, added the cheese blend and lastly topped with a little oregano (fancy!). When that process was finished, as it should have been, I found myself wondering what exactly she was going to do with the remaining time left in the video. Was she going to eat the pizza on camera? Maybe just a couple alternate angle glamour shots of her creation? Boy was I mistaken and, soon to be, horrified.
Next, she took her completed pizzas and popped them in an air fryer?
Sidebar: People are obsessed with air fryers, especially on TikTok. Everywhere you look is a new air fryer recipe. It's overwhelming and is so shoved down my throat at this point I'm nearly anti-air fryer as a whole.
Back to the point. She crisped up her pizzas and ruined the sanctity of the Lunchables pizza. They looked burnt, dry and frankly a little bit greasy, all qualities the Lunchables pizza is specifically supposed to combat. Take a look for yourself.
As upset as this made me, I figured this was a rogue occurrence by a lunatic. However, I owed it to myself and my journalism school degree to make sure. Boy was I once again mistaken. A quick google search showed me that apparently Kylie Jenner had tackled this same topic herself back in 2018 with horrifying results.
SEVENTY ONE PERCENT? At this time, Kylie had over 120 million instagram followers, so this is a GIANT sample size. My world started to spin around me. I was the human embodiment of the Mr. Krabs meme. Am I the weirdo here? Was I eating Lunchables wrong (and being an elitist) about it this entire time? Being that it was 1 am and I couldn't get the right response from my Twitter followers at this time, I popped a tweet in the draft and went to bed.
This morning I arose with only one thing on my mind. Am I the Lunchables weirdo? I must know. But it was still too early. I had to wait until prime Twitter time (noon to 2 pm). I went for a run, made some food and then finally sent the Tweet. Did I skew the direction a bit with my phrasing? Sure. But this is my account and I'll do as I damn well please.
The responses flooded in quickly and almost immediately realized I was not the weirdo. Nearly everyone was confused.
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This assuaged a ton of my stress. Aside from my coworker Jordie, who apparently wrote a blog in defense of MICROWAVING pizza Lunchables back in 2015, which I cannot even begin to unpack (weirdo, gross, horrible), people were almost exclusively with me.
However, something even more troubling arose. I put out a call to action to find the original TikTok which I couldn't find, and more examples of people absolutely butchering these delicious, simple creations came to light. All the relief that had flooded into my brain just moments ago was slashed away. Here are a few of these abominations.
A butane blowtorch that is definitely used for dabs on the pizza? This would undoubtably both make the pizza taste like lighter fluid while not even achieving any sort of actual cooking.
Honestly, a lot going on here. I do not like it. I do not think any of you will like it. Giant endorsement for team no cook.
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Why are you adding extra cheese? Why is the pepperoni under the cheese? The recipe is a recipe for a reason, it does not need your bullshit remixes.
I planned on this being around 300 words and we are now sitting around 650, so I think it is best for me to wrap this up. All I ask is you not do this. If it isn't broke, don't fix it people.