Lead image by Alex Reyes

My name's Nick Gazin and I am VICE's art editor, but I also eat a lot of frozen food. This is a column where I discuss that. So that's how that works.

This week's installment is dedicated to frozen pizza and frozen pizza-inspired foodstuffs. Most frozen pizza things I've tried have been terrible so far, but serves me right for being so lazy that I eat frozen pizza.

I live in New York City, a pizza mecca. I can just yell, "Piiiiiiizzzzaaaaa!" out my back window and a few random slices will get tossed directly into my open mouth! Anyway here are reviews of the things I ate, although when I look at the photos now, I can't say for certain why I ate them.

Bagel Bites are one of the major players of frozen food and they must be shown reverence. "Pizza in the morning, pizza in the evening, pizza…" you know how the ancient hymn goes. It tells you that when pizza is on a bagel you can have pizza anytime. Even though it wasn't difficult to have pizza anytime before the advent of Bagel Bites.

The problem with Bagel Bites is that the pizza scientists were so busy figuring out if they could make pizza anytime that they didn't think about if they should make pizza anytime. I didn't wait the recommended few minutes to let the mini pizzas cool and burned my mouth upon biting into the first one.

After my mouth healed, I decided I would probably buy these again. You can buy a package containing as many as 72 Bagel Bites, but I think I could probably just stop at 15.

GRADE: A

Krasdale sucks. My colleague River Donaghey brought Krasdale brand toilet paper to my home and the low quality of the toilet paper led me to imagine a series of scratchy, thin pizza bagels. Even the split-level logo looks cheap, like it's in the process of collapsing. The name almost feels like a joke. It pretty much starts with the word "crass." It might as well have been called "Oafsdale."

Although the nine mini pizza bagels looked almost exactly like Bagel Bites, appearances can be deceiving. The cheese sucked and tasted like third-rate fake garbage. The bagel's mouthfeel is like a cruel prank, all cheap and cotton candy-ish. The tomato sauce is fine, I guess. The other elements sucked so bad I didn't notice the sauce. I wish I could be more descriptive about how and why it sucked but I can't. I was in a fugue state where all I could see were visions of toilets on fire and raccoons eating Krasdale products and spitting them out in disgust. It was like that scene in Terminator 2 when Sarah Connor sees the vision of a playground bursting into flame.

Fuck you, Krasdale. Bagel Bites forever! And fuck River Donaghey for bringing cheap toilet paper to my home!

GRADE: D

The back of the box warns, "Be Cautious on First Bite." That's going to be the title of my book about the joy of cooking frozen food. These 15 little rolls are like crust envelopes and inside each envelope is a letter that says, "Cheese and sauce, but mostly air."

They're are better than Krasdale mini pizzas, but not as good as Bagel Bites. I get the sense no frozen pizza thing will dethrone Bagel Bites as the best frozen pizza-inspired food product.

Despite cooking the rolls to the point where the sauce exploded out of some of them, the cheese was not totally melted and looked like a mass of partially-melted little cheese cubes.

When I finally ate the cooked rolls, their flavor was overwhelmed by the taste of bread and tangy sauce. All subtlety was lost and the component parts failed to complement each other, instead competing for attention from your taste buds. When you bite into them, there's a springiness, like a springboard. The resistance gives each bite a feeling of accomplishment: "No, pizza roll, I will eat you!" And then you eat the pizza roll. And then you eat all of the pizza rolls. And then you are the winner.

GRADE: B-

This didn't come out looking like I expected. For one, the cheese melted far beyond the perimeters of the pizza and was orange, and second, it was labeled as mushroom-flavored when it is clearly nightmare-style.

When I picked up this lonely man's pizza, the crust was rigid like a frisbee. The cheese didn't feel right, and coated my teeth like a thick plaque, sticking in every crevice of my molars imaginable. The mouthfeel could only be described as "panic-inducing." The cheese and sauce may have morphed together into one orange substance that looked like what you get when you add water to corn starch. This was more like eating a round matzoh with congealed chowder on it. I wouldn't eat it again for less than $50.

This didn't come out looking like I expected. For one, the cheese was orange and melted far beyond the perimeters of the pizza, and second, it was labeled as mushroom-flavored when it is clearly nightmare-style.

When I picked up this lonely man's pizza, the crust was rigid like a frisbee. The cheese didn't feel right, and coated my teeth like a thick plaque, sticking in every crevice of my molars. The mouthfeel could only be described as "panic-inducing" and the cheese and sauce morphed together into one orange substance that looked like what you get when you add water to corn starch. This was more like eating a round matzoh with congealed chowder on it. I wouldn't eat it again for less than $50.

GRADE: D

I cooked this one in the oven since microwaving my last frozen pizza looked like puke.

The sauce was as sweet as jelly. The crust was like a bread whoopee cushion. The cheese was like a weird un-cheese. Better than Celeste, but not good enough that I would ever eat it again.

GRADE: C

These are pleasant in both texture and warmth. Like every frozen food that's swaddled in a bread wrap, these all exploded in the oven, but that was to be expected. The taste was a little bland, but Cholula fixed that.

One thing I noticed is that on other Amy's foods, like the Mattar Paneer or Pad Thai, the boxes have a message on the back that states Amy's parents are friends with Indian people and/or Thai people. The back of the pizza snacks' box doesn't mention anything about being pals with Italian people, which made me sad.

I want to know that the people who make the frozen, pizza-inspired foodlery have at least one friend of Italian descent. Otherwise, it feels like cultural appropriation, which is a major concern when I eat pouch food.

GRADE: C+

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