Disclaimer: this is much longer and more disjointed than I had planned.

So Crust are getting a heart foundation tick of approval on six of their pizzas. It seems that we find this important enough for it to be a “top 5” article on The Age, to also be posted on NEWS.com.au as “Heart Foundation gives Pizza the tick”, and on abc.net.au as “Nutritionists ticked off over approval for pizza chain.” If you check out the Crust website you’ll notice the tick of approval is already proudly displayed.

TV ratings evidence would suggest that us Australians are as fat obsessed as the next nation with high levels of obesity (we were ranked 21 in the world on percentage of population overweight at last count.

But… why the interest? Why the coverage? Sure, almost anything can get in the news these days (and if it’s not good enough for the news it still has a chance to get on Today Tonight or A Current Affair) but a pizza chain getting a heart foundation tick is usually the sort of thing that would slip by relatively unnoticed.

Which leads me off on a wild tangent to the questions at hand.

• Is pizza in any way an identifiable part of our national identity?
• If it is an identifiable part of our national identity… do we bring anything to the pizza oven or are we just riding along?

I think I can address the first question fairly quickly… like so:

• Pizza goes with beer
• Beer is part of our national identity
• Therefore, pizza is part of our national identity… by proxy. QED

It’s the second question that troubles me. Do we bring anything to the world of pizza or are we just riding along?

I’ll start this with some beer talk and meander around semi-aimlessly until I arrive limp at the end, sans-conclusion.

In beer terms, Australia is starting to produce some great beer. Those who doubt me should put down their imported beers for a second and try something from Red Oak, Murray’s, Barons, Little Creatures or any of a number of small boutique breweries. I enjoy an Orval as much as anybody but some of these boutique breweries in Australia are producing great beer. Particularly Red Oak and Murray’s.

Yet, whilst we are starting to create some great beers we’re still generally recognised for Fosters internationally and many Australians would sooner pick up an adjunct lager like Corona or a mass produced import like Heineken than adventure into the world of Australian boutique beers.

The same goes for pizza. Dominos and Pizza Hut are both heavily entrenched in the Australian market complete with crusts stuffed with five different kinds of bad cheese and five different kinds of meat derivative products.

So how about the so-called gourmet chains? The ones I know, and have tried are Crust (NSW, Victoria and Brisbane) and GPK (NSW) in addition to a few smaller chains that have the same feel to them. Usually I find the term gourmet dubious, and I was with these places labelling themselves as such, but generally they’re of varying good standards - if you’re not in a pizza purist mood. I’m not going to review them but my experience with Crust was ok and with GPK was actually good. Their bases are good - again in a non-traditional way.

Still, there are too many pizza places in Australia with the word gourmet attached. In some cases gourmet seems to mean “our pizzas consist primarily of ingredients you don’t normally find on pizza” and in some instances it just seems to mean “our pizzas are more than 20 dollars each and we have one with some sort of Teriyaki chicken on it.

I really hope that running with the word gourmet isn’t the only thing of note about Australian Pizza.

So, where else to look. Perhaps to those members of the Australian community with Italian heritage. According to the 2006 Census that is somewhere around 800 000 of us, which sounds promising. After all, if there is someone I can trust not to put pineapple on my pizza, it’s usually an Italian.

I can only really speak for Sydney here as I haven’t lived in any other states, but for traditional, neapolitan style pizza it’s usually the inner west to Haberfield and La Disfida, Napoli in Bocca or Il Goloso. I know these places get bad reviews at times and I have actually taken people there that were entirely unimpressed but you get real mozzarella (you know, the type that’s more white than yellow) and, as you can tell by watching the pizzas being prepared and cooked in the wood-fired ovens, it’s treated like a craft.

Still, looking at these places, Toto’s at nearby five dock, Rosso Pomodoro at Balmain or a number of other pizza joints around there’s nothing that grabs me as uniquely Australian about them. Sure the pizza is good, sure we have many Australians with great Italian heritage but… where is the Australian edge on all of this?

I know, at this point I may be renounced as a heretic but I do think there should be room for something Australian about our pizza. In the same way that our national football team needs to find an Australian playing style, and just like how we need to produced Australian beers, I think we should be doing something more than overusing the term gourmet and putting heart foundation ticks on things.

If Barons can put Wattle Seed in a beer and actually get a good result, then why can’t somebody do something with Pizza that still does the rest properly but adds a small touch of Australia to it.

Again, I know i’d be called a pizza heretic for suggesting something like this but why not Macadamia oil? Why not bush tomatoes? Mountain Pepper?

Why not indeed? Next pizza I make is getting the native ingredients treatment. I’ll let you know how it goes.

As for the fat obsession, I don’t think we should worry. Just tell the kids that Pizza is a sometimes food. Anyway, on that leaderboard of the fattest nations Italy comes in at 111 to our 21. I’m hazarding a guess that they consume more pizza than Australia per-capita.

Oh, and by the way, if anyone in Melbourne has been to Pizza Faro, what did you think? I’m a big fan of spelt flour and I hear Pizza Faro makes a particularly good spelt pizza base. Plus, it seems you can order their pizzas with Buffalo cheese from the Shaw River. With the Shaw River being in Australia I think that’s a great idea.