Since I am about to blow the
whistle on a dangerous food product, I will give the protagonist of this true
story a Smart Ass Cripple alias. I’ll call him Joe DiMaggio.
Joe DiMaggio is blind and the
father of two boys, ages 6 and 8. One day recently, Joe DiMaggio was preparing
to make dinner for them. So he set the oven on 450 degrees and took a
frozen pizza from Home Run Inn out of the freezer. He placed the pizza on the
rack inside the hot oven. But about 15 minutes later, the smoke detector was
blaring and black smoke billowed from the oven.
Joe DiMaggio says, "There
was literally a grease fire in the bottom of the oven."
That happened because Joe DiMaggio
put the pizza on the rack upside down and the cheese dripped down onto the
coils on the bottom of the oven and ignited.
Joe DiMaggio thinks Home Run
Inn is "the best” frozen pizza. But this was the third time he'd placed one
in the oven upside down and a fire ensued. And every time it was a plain cheese
pizza.
It’s hard for a blind person to
tell which side is which on a Home Run Inn plain cheese pizza because the
cheese is smooth. On other frozen pizzas, Joe DiMaggio says, the cheese is in
shreds so that provides a reliable, Braille-like clue as to which side the toppings
are on.
The same is true, Joe DiMaggio
says, of Home Run Inn pizzas with additional bumpy toppings like pepperoni or
veggies. "I've never put a
sausage one in upside down,” he says.
The other problem is that Home Run
Inn frozen pizzas don’t come with the customary cardboard disc that provides an
additional indicator of which side is the bottom.
And Joe DiMaggio isn’t the only
blind person having this problem. He also has a brother who is blind, whom I
will call Dom DiMaggio. And Dom has also put Home Run Inn cheese pizzas in the
oven upside down.
So I called the Home Run Inn
headquarters and I ended up with a pleasant customer service agent named
Michelle. I told her about the plight of Joe and Dom. She acknowledged that the
cheese on Home Run Inn pizzas is smooth because the pizzas are baked before
they are frozen. She also said that no cardboard discs are included because the
cardboard absorbs moisture from the pizza and makes the crust brittle.
Thus, Michelle said, even
sighted people have reported putting cheese pizzas in the oven upside down
because it’s also hard to tell top from bottom visually. Michelle said she
tells people there are tiny ventilation holes on the bottom of the pizza that look like the crust
was stabbed several times with a fork. If you see them, you know that’s the bottom.
Michelle said she hopes Joe Dom and other blind people can find the holes by
feeling for them. “I'm sure their sense of touch is much more acute than
yours and mine," she said.
"I've thought about giving
it a quick lick," he says.