I’m sure sometime this summer a focus group convened to brainstorm ways that you could connect with the student body more, ways to be hipper, like the “Apple of mass-mediocre-food-distributors.”
And you tried your best. You left the meeting with the mutual understanding that changing your staple food’s name from pizza to ‘Za was just what the doctor ordered for energizing our student body.
Alas, when the students leave Pepperdine every year, we don’t go into hibernation pods like you may have thought. We go back to our homes, and inhabit the real world, working jobs, hanging out with friends, and even eating pizza.
Maybe you thought you could pull a fast one on us, that some athlete would come back on campus and give his usual spiel to freshmen about how sub-par and runny your pizza was, only to discover that the pizzas were in fact gone, replaced by this new mythical dish called ‘Za, which just so happened to attack your taste buds like a cavalry of heavenly horseman.
Maybe you thought said athlete would call up his friends and distant relatives, urging them to get their butts down to the Caf as fast as they could to try out this revolutionary ‘Za thing, that we’d throw jubilant parties on main campus, rejoicing in the revelry of a world in which such food existed, cheese on top of tomato paste on top of bread.
Maybe you thought that as soon as we finished exulting in the glory of this ‘Za thing, that our attentions would turn to you, the benevolent creator and generous provider of such a dish.
I am 21 years old, now into my third decade of life. I want to let you know that I, like every student on campus, have enough brain activity to know ‘Za is not a thing. It never was, and never will be. I know that over the summer, this country wasn’t experiencing a pizza renaming revolution that I somehow failed to notice. Americans eat pizza like twice a day. If you were planning on rebranding a food, why not go with cauliflower? No one would’ve ever noticed.
We live in a world where chubby little kids named Honey Boo-Boo have their own record-breaking TV shows, a world where someone’s lack of initiative about whether or not they want you to call them can become a chart-topping single.
We cannot live in a world where pizza is shortened to ‘Za. It will be the straw that breaks our society’s back.
This is an institution for higher learning. We can’t start abbreviating any word we’d like just for funsies. It’s not like it was ever that hard to say to begin with that it needed shortening – it’s 2 syllables. Peet. Zah. If this continues to exist, I’d like to posit the question: When will it stop? Will people be hitting the ‘stroom, ‘ogging on the ‘ack, and ‘atching some ‘ays at the ‘each?
It was a good effort. But it’s madness, and I can’t stand here on the sidelines with my mouth closed any longer…even though it’s been a week.
Sodexho, please, for the sake of all things good and decent, please stop trying to make ‘Za happen.
