84. Totino’s Party Pizza

The crust is similar to a saltine cracker without the salt or the sturdiness, and the sparsely-scattered cheese does not even resemble actual cheese. The tomato sauce is flavorless, serving only as a cost-efficient bonding agent for the rest of the irregularly-spaced toppings. And the meats are like those “Baby’s First Foods” that you try once, and only once, in your first child’s early development.

Toss all of this together and bind it in indestructible hermetically-sealed cellophane and you will have constructed what looks like a stage prop to be used for the dining room scene of a high school play. And I absolutely love it.

This serves to remind me of a Red Auerbach story. As the crusty basketball sage of the Boston Celtics watched Dennis Johnson, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish, and Bill Walton go through pre-game introductions, he concluded, “Those are four very good basketball players.” And finally when the fifth player, Larry Bird joined them after being introduced, Auerbach then added, “Those are five GREAT basketball players.”

And so it is with the humble Totino’s Party Pizza, but even more pronounced, because those are four non-great ingredients that surpass the sum of their collective parts. Once the ten-minute baking cycle concludes, well…it all comes together in a way that defies physics. And the cherry on top (food metaphor!) is that they’re usually available at depression-era pricing. This is a product that succeeds against all reason and logic.

I separated this from other off-the-rack frozens because of its improbability to satisfy. And you can still find them priced around $1. I would say it’s comparable to the tiny hyphenated NCAA school that bumps off a power conference college in a first-round tournament upset. It eventually falls short of ultimate glory, but it delivers a pretty satisfying experience along the way.