Blueberry Cream Cheese Pizza Postgame Rundown

I discussed last night's disturbing pizza experience with my friend Limster, who's currently living in London.

It strikes me as interesting and important to note that there's an inflection point that must be recognized when a trend becomes deeply enshrined in culture. There's a vast difference between "I hate this stupid food trend!" (which can be spoken like an insider by an outsider) and "I hate your stupid cuisine!" (which cannot).

At another level - I love the complexity of all this! - if I were to bring non-cosmopolitan people unfamiliar with Korean culture and cuisine to a place like this, they'd probably feel compelled to be extremely polite and deferential about the pizza, assuming it's The Korean Way, and therefore impolite to take issue with. It takes considerable experience with and sympathy for the culture to recognize that this is just goofy kids gone pretentiously awry. My eye-rolling is from the perspective of my Korean stem cells, not my American ones.

But this makes it that much more necessary to recognize the elusive inflection point if (heaven forbid) this sort of thing actually enshrines in the future. If so, I'll work overtime to seek out the best available version (maybe this was just a bad blueberry cream cheese pizza!) and try to experience it with the most Korean palate I can muster. If I still hate it, oh well. My pref, my bad. In that case, it's me, not them.

For the time being, however, it's them, not me....though I'd certainly never condemn anyone for their prefs. There's never anything wrong with liking stuff (I myself like mushy leftover pasta, but readily admit it's a guilty pleasure) and I believe snobbery ("You're bad for liking that!") is downright evil, reducing people's precious happiness.


There may come a point where this entire discussion would be an illegal, perhaps even capital, offense; where every stupidity must be treasured and never publicly questioned; where tolerance is infinite, so intolerance is infinitely intolerated. Once again: beware utopias, they get dystopian real fast.