I just about lost my breakfast when I read the headline of the source story for this post. The very thought of eating something that’s been subjected to toxic gasses and other poisons that come out of a volcano freaks me out!
Pizza tour group atop Mt. Pacaya, Guatamala…
It’s more a tourist attraction than a restaurant, as such – but is it the ultimate dinner destination, nevertheless? One way or the other… The perpetrators of this new fad say folks – predominantly younger Gens – are beating a path to their oven door…
Didn’t think it through?
I’m betting the kids behind this faddistic, scary concept just didn’t bother to think it through. If they had – or if they had as much as consulted someone who knows anything about volcanoes – I’m sure they would have been dissuaded from doing it.
Bad for the food
There have been enough TV documentaries and online posts about volcanoes in the past few years that I would have everyone would be properly informed about these literally-from-Hell killing ma-chines. There’s nothing about them that’s safe – much less predictable.
Volcanoes can emit lava and ash at temperatures of hundreds or even thousand of degrees. More dangerously, they also exhale toxic gases – predominantly carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide – that can kill any living thing they come in contact with before it knows what’s happening. Some you can see, taste or smell. Others are undetectable. But deadly, nonetheless.
Potent toxins including sulfur can ooze or spew from erupting or merely active-but-just-simmering volcanic calderas or crevices.
Bad for the dude…
… Or dudette who dares to challenge a volcano’s natural superiority and dominion over all it survey. Aside from all the toxins in the air and everywhere. There are other dangers more visible and far more terrifying than toxins.
When volcanoes blow up, sending millions of tons of ash into the sky, it often falls back to Earth in cascades known as pyroclastic flows. These billowly ‘flows’ can avalanche down the mountainsides at hundreds of miles / km per hour, and they can reach temperatures of hundreds of degrees. It was pyroclastic flows from Mount Vesuvius that smothered the ancient Italian cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 AD…
Brilliant! Just brilliant!
So… Now we hear that enterprising young entrepreneurs are touring adventurous diners up 8,000 ft. / 2,843 m Volcano Pacaya, one of three active volcanoes in Guatamala. And feeding them pizza made à la minute (on the spot), baked before their very eyes in the heat of the volcano, itself.
Tours include professionally-guided treks up the mountains and a pizza lunch by organizer Pizza Pacaya, owned by founder chef Mario David García.
My take
You can’t outrun their lava or ash flows. You can’t see some of their most insidious dangers (toxic gases) coming. They can kill you before you know what’s happening.
Volcanoes can deposit dangerous toxins in your lungs, eyes, nasal and oral cavities. They can loose into the air ash clouds which almost always contain micro-particles of glass and other potentially deadly substances.
The New York Post has dubbed Pizza Pacaya, ‘the World’s Most Dangerous Pizza’.
My questions to you:
Would you trek up the mountain – at a tour package cost starting at (US)$ 175 per person – for a slice of volcano-blasted pizza?
Does the prospect of being caught up there during even a small eruption dissuade you, at all?
Are you concerned that volcano-baked pizza may not be the healthiest thing you could partake of when lunching in Guatamala?
Muse on that…
~ Maggie J.