Pompeii pizza anyone?

Pizza has to be India’s favourite non-Indian dish. Just the visual of a soft & warm bread base, topped with multiple juicy topping, oozing with tomato sauce and cheese is enough to make us salivate. For most of us, our vocabulary of?lingua italiana?starts and ends with many varieties of pizza - margherita, Neapolitan, Sicilian and so forth.

I certainly won’t claim to be an expert in all things pizza, but I was taken aback when I read about the discovery of pizza from Pompeii. Just to be sure, I am talking about the ancient city of Pompeii, near Naples, which was destroyed more than 2000 years ago when Mount Vesuvius erupted. Last week, media went gaga over the excavated painting of something that looks like the modern day pizza. What made this discovery even more interesting is that Pompei is close to Naples which is acknowledged as the birthplace of our modern day pizza.

The painting shows a round bread with toppings of various fruits, including a pomegranate and a date. The dish is served on a silver tray with a goblet of wine. Classy! To be fair, Pompeii pizza is very different from the one we know now. There are no tomatoes (tomatoes entered Europe for the first time in mid 1500) and buffalo milk mozzarella cheese did not exist as well.

Is Pompeii pizza truly a pizza without tomato and buffalo milk mozzarella? In a philosophical sense, what makes a pizza? The round bread? Tomato sauce? Buffalo milk mozzarella? What if we have a square base with cow milk mozzarella and tamarind tomato chutney? Is it still pizza?

Pompeii pizza is a classic illustration of one of the famous philosophy paradoxes- called the “Ship of Theseus”. Here is how this paradox goes- if all parts of a wooden ship are replaced gradually and one-by-one over time, is this ship after replacements the same ship before replacements and at what stage it ceases to be the original ship?

Well, we will never be able to figure out Pompeii pizza and Theseus’ ship fully, but here is my point: as human beings, we always understate or downplay the long term changes. When we did not have a mobile phone, it was difficult to imagine one. When we had a feature phone, it was difficult to imagine a touch screen. And, now that we have touch screens, we may struggle to imagine a virtual phone that is unlike today’s rectangular slab we hold.?

Or for that matter, we will find it difficult to imagine a future where human beings may check into a body health and maintenance workshop for an annual check-up, body part replacement, tuning, servicing & rejuvenation.?

And, that’s the reason we will also struggle to recognise Pompeii pizza as pizza and we will struggle to accept that pizza of the future may not look or taste like the one we love today.?

Hungry kya?