Pizzafish

A couple days ago, I had one of the weirdest dreams of my life. Here's what I remember:

• I was with a bunch of people (don't remember who) in the Rocky Mountains
• There was a lake nearby populated with a certain kind of (fictional) fish
• We ate the fish and it contained both white and red meat. I hazily remember this as similar to the Simpsons (or Family Guy, can't remember) where the pig rolls over and offers some bacon ready to be peeled away from its stomach. The fish wasn't talking to us, but it was like there were strips ready to go and they were labeled with easy-to-pull tabs indicating red or white.
• Even more bizarrely, there was a whole pizza inside the stomach of the fish. And somehow I knew (by that particular inexplicable surety unique to dreams) that the pizza was a naturally occurring phenomenon inside the stomach of this fish. 

I posted this in less detailed form on Facebook the other day but it's such a fascinating dream that I felt compelled to expand it into its own blog post and examine some of the consequences that would arise from a world in which the Pizzafish existed.

First, I should note that I think the pizza was a plain cheese pizza. This is a detail that I hadn't considered, but after a friend posed the question in response to the aforementioned Facebook post, I searched back through my memory and while said memory is extremely uncertain, doesn't it just seem like, were pizza to be found naturally occurring in the world, it should occur as the classic trio of crust, sauce and cheese?

Anyway, the first post-dream analysis question that popped into my head is whether pizza would be considered meat in this world. The first instinct is to say yes, it would. After all, other animals have stomachs that are edible (and presumably the contents of the stomachs are part of that, I don't really know), and those are certainly not considered to be vegetarian. 

However, a friend pointed out pizza could be analogous to eggs in this case. If the fish were to release the pizza from its insides as a chicken does an egg, then clearly it isn't meat, because no animal is killed in order to collect the pizza. But a chicken might not be the best analogy: fish lay eggs too, and humans eat them. Caviar, however, is collected from dead fish. Despite what you may think, there are no caviar trawlers out there, scraping the ocean floor for tiny delicacies. Therefore, according to chickensaysmoo on Yahoo! Answers, caviar is not vegetarian, and accordingly, in our hypothetical Pizzafish dreamworld, neither would pizza be.

Pizza-as-fish-egg raises another large question, though. Are we to assume that in Pizzafishland, as such a world would obviously be called and the name we will use from this point forward, the Pizzafish springs forth from pizza itself? Well, dramatic changes in physiology are not unprecedented: think caterpillar/butterfly. So it does at least seem conceivable that a fish could go through an early life stage as a pizza. 

Unfortunately, the dream's timeframe wasn't long enough for me to witness the lifespan of a Pizzafish, so I can't give you an absolute answer. But given that the pizza is a natural phenomenon, it must have served some purpose - that's just straight-up evolution. Animals don't evolve superfluous body parts. What purpose could the pizza have served besides reproduction?

I suppose the pizza could have been useful in order to feed newborn Pizzafish. Perhaps the Pizzafish's offspring would spend the first stage of their life growing inside their creator, mammal style, and would feed themselves on the pizza. This is an unsatisfying answer, however, as it leads to two questions: 1) would this mean the Pizzafish could only reproduce once, or would it be able to re-generate its pizza? and 2) after being raised on a diet of pizza, would the young Pizzafish not struggle to survive upon exiting the womb, only to discover a vast ocean with no pizza?

Another, more esoteric possibility is that the pizza is something like a physical manifestation of the cat-nine-lives principle. Perhaps a Pizzafish has the same number of lives as the number of slices in its pizza, and each lost slice brings it that much closer to death.

This scenario has also led me to speculate about pizza delivery in Pizzafishland. At what stage would the pizza be extracted from the fish? If we are to believe that Pizzafish follow the trend of other fish, the extraction occurs somewhere on land after the Pizzafish has been caught. But this doesn't narrow down the possibilities much. The pizza could be removed immediately upon being caught, by the pizza place, or not until it's delivered to the customer. 

I'd imagine that in most cases the pizza would be removed early in the process and pizza delivery would be pretty much the same as it is in our world. However, I would guess that there would be Pizzafish snobs who would insist on a fresh, un-excavated Pizzafish. Naturally, niche businesses would pop up to serve this population.

One of the things I love about science fiction is speculation about how the world would change if it was altered somehow. Clearly the existence of the Pizzafish, a relatively minor existence in the grand scheme of things, would lead to far-reaching consequences that would fundamentally change our world. Don't be surprised if we return to this topic and delve into more detail about the theoretical yet delicious Pizzafishland.