Papa John doesn't want you to know what's in their pizza

Papa John's prides itself on using fresh, high quality ingredients. Problem being, they won't tell you what they are.

Legally, packaged foods are required to include an ingredients list. But this is not the case for restaurants or fast food places. A lot of them include their ingredients and nutritional info as a courtesy to customers, but they are not legally required to.

(Can I go off on a tangent here? I have been looking for the ingredients list for the milk Starbucks uses for a while now. Having read this story, now I understand why I can't find it. I'm convinced that their milk is sweetened, but I guess there is no way I will ever really know for sure.)

Papa John's is one of many chains that refuses to give out any kind of ingredients info for their pizzas. In fact, when a reporter contacted the company about this issue, they were told that if they had any allergen questions, they should email someone at the company to ask.

That's pretty lousy for those who suffer food allergies. And what about the rest of us, who just want to know what goes into our food? I myself have spent a lot of time looking for cellulose lately. You find it in a lot of things, and here's the deal with cellulose: it is literally just wood pulp. This indigestible material gets added to foods in order to bulk them up cheaply. That's right, they put sawdust in your cake mix to give it a better heft. How crazy is that?

Papa John's says "better ingredients," but how do we know what that means? We don't, and they aren't telling us.

The best we can say is that, given that their pizzas are made and sold in the United States, they probably contain ingredients which are generally recognized as safe by the FDA. Beyond that, it's just one big question mark.

Image courtesy Flickr/oldandsolo