Food recalls are a rather regular part of being involved in the massive widespread food distribution system that exists at really large retail outlets such as Wal-Mart so this part of the story isn't really all that surprising although it did make multiple international news stories.
I don't think that the reason behind it was because of the actual recall but because of the rather ridiculous products that were involved in the recall. I am from the USA, so don't think I am turning on my own here, but I find it a bit crazy that the diet of the average person would include having some of the most unhealthy food imaginable ready to heat up in the microwave at a moment's notice.
This is one of the two pizzas that was recalled because of a fear of a salmonella outbreak possibility and I am not going to concern myself with how that could be or even what it specifically entails. Salmonella is one of those words that I have always just known is a bad thing but never really bothered to look into it further.
I see these things in the grocery store every now and them and don't get the wrong idea, I am not a food snob and I regularly eat at fast-food joints. But when you start to look at how much one of these things costs, and then you look at the list of chemicals that goes into it, not only are you getting a "chemical pie" but you also aren't really even saving that much money compared to if you were to order a pizza from one of the thousands of places that exist to make one of these things for you in a kind of "fresh" and not frozen way.
2 and 1/2 feet of cheese in the crust!
I do get a kick out of things like this on labeling because this is marketing for dummies. The length of something is irrelevant because you can make that same cheese stretch several km if you made it thin enough. But as has been shown in the past when you put weight, especially grams, on the labeling of a product in the US, this is a rather meaningless statistic to show to the kind of person that would feel compelled to purchase this in the first place.
Companies are able to make things that are horrible for you appear as though they are less bad by messing with the serving size. This is quite common like when they will sell a giant single-use container of something to drink and it is definitely intended for one person to consume but they will conceal the fact that it is basically a pot of sugar sauce by putting that the jug o' drank is actually four or five servings, which we all know isn't true.
The 320 calories that this "meal" apparently gets for you is a mere 2 slices, it might be even more difficult to determine than this because from the picture, it doesn't look like the pizza is actually cut into anything that divides by 5 and I can't imagine that anyone who would buy this is a math-wizard.
We also all know that nobody that buys this sort of thing is going to just have a tiny bit of it. They are going to eat the entire thing.
So while I guess it is great that Wal-Mart is recalling pizzas that could possibly make people terribly ill, they are only doing this because their lawyers probably looked at how many people could possibly get sick, multiply that buy the average payout on a lawsuit, and then determined that it would be cheaper to just recall and destroy them all. If the situation was the other way around, you can be all but guaranteed that these pizzas would have remained on store shelves.
I do find it kind of funny the monstrosity that we have made pizza in my lifetime. We went from having like 3 choices, all of which were sauce, cheese, and a couple basic toppings, to doing all sorts of crazy crap with the crust including putting an entire day's worth of calories inside the crust just for that extra dairy boost that a person might need in their day of sitting on their fat ass while enjoying their diabetes.
I'm not going to try to tell everyone to eat vegetables and what not but seriously, what are we eating? what has food become in my lifetime? Remember when Twinkies and Moon Pies were the only culinary monstrosities that existed in your life? I do.