Behind the Friday night pizza binge is a vast network of distribution routes and workers, allowing tomatoes in California to become sauce on your pie. These hidden patterns and rhythms are exposed in a documentary by PBS (UK) called America Revealed. The Domino’s Pizza supply chain is visualized from farm to table, unveiling its high ecological footprint.
The program reveals the GPS tagged route of a bicycle pizza deliveryman on a busy Friday night in the heart of New York City. We zoom out a level to the supply chain center in Connecticut, which supplies the food for all the Domino’s stores in the Northeast Region. Zoom out again and watch the lines of the satellite tracked-refrigerated trucks as they move supplies across the country, resembling the arterial networks of the human body. Eventually, the pizza is tracked all the way back to its source: California’s Central Valley, where nearly 50% of America’s fruits, nuts and vegetables are grown.
The American industrial revolution has created the most productive food machine in the world, feeding nearly 300 million people each day. For the first time in human history, 98 percent of the population is fed by those comprising less than 2 percent.The cost of this appetite has had a huge impact on our health and environment.
Check out the trailer below or watch the full episode here. You will never be able to look at a pizza the same way again.
Main image credit: FreeDigitalPhotos.net