Pizza Snub: Windy City Left in the Cold

When Katie wrote earlier this week that the White House asked some Midwest pizza makers to come bake deep-dish pies for the first family, we thought it was a fun enterprising story about life on Pennsylvania Avenue. Pizza in the White House? Oh those Obamas. They're just like the rest of us!

But it turns out that everything -- and apparently everything -- that POTUS does is a political statement, least of which being his pizza choice. Here's why: White House staff extended the come-bake-for-us invitation to two pizza makers from St. Louis even though the Obamas are from Chicago, which also happens to be the origin and epicenter of deep-dish pizza. At first Chicago pizza-bosses didn't believe it. Then, when confirmed, they got insulted.

The Chicago Tribune reports that the snub has ruffled feathers in Obama's home town. "I like his economic policy—I think he's going to get us out of trouble. I like his foreign policy—he's making friends around the world. His pizza policy is going to have to change," Marc Malnati, who owns 30 pizzerias around Chicago, told the Tribune. Other hometown pie brokers were simply bemused at why Obama would want pizza that is "not as good as ours." The White House's original reasoning was that Obama remembered the St. Louis pizza that he had on the campaign trail as the best he had ever tasted. But when asked for a response to the hurt feelings in the Windy City, the White House declined to comment.

Let's just hope Obama, who grew up in Hawaii, doesn't develop an itchin' for those delicious New England pineapples.