The ad above is from Life Magazine, November 5, 1965. It's for Jeno's Pizza.
Do you remember this stuff?! Sweet jimminy, can you imagine THAT (look at the photo on lower right) passing as pizza?! More like Ragu® on a Ritz®!
Well, "back in the day", Jeno's pizza-in-a-box was high livin', I'm sure. Today? Pizza just ain't pizza without sixty pounds of cheese and enough grease to light up Chicago. Jeno's tomato-stained disk is a far cry from the franchise-fueled fill-fest of today.
But - and this is coming from a guy who's been a victim of hundreds of pizza photo shoots - the strange thing is that someone, somewhere, looked at that photo and thought, "Yeah. That's a goooood-lookin' pizza. Let's use THAT one. Yeah. That one. It'll be great!"
And someone else pinned, "Oh yeah! It's makin' me hungry just lookin' at it!"
Reality is relative. Makes ya'wonder what people 40 years from now are going to be thinking when looking at food photography from today. It's far better to look back on the paltry pizza of 1965 and think, "Is that all there was?!?" than fast-forward to 2049 and know that some starving, post-apocalyptic shelter dweller is salivating over an old Pizza Hut flier.
Bah. We're modern Romans. We should be happy that we don't have to spear Mastodons for food and clothing.
