Thin-crusted DeSantis takes a slice of the ridiculous with Delray Beach pizzeria visit

Gov. Ron DeSantis made a special trip to a Delray Beach pizza restaurant this week to pose for a photo with the staff there and post it on his social media account.

It’s worth noting that there are more than 5,400 pizza restaurants in Florida, so it’s hardly a novelty that another one has opened up.

Wait a second. The pizzeria that warranted the governor’s visit didn’t just open. It began serving pizzas there last May, 11 months ago.

“Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana from New Haven, Connecticut, has come to Delray Beach at 1701 Federal Hwy!” DeSantis tweeted, hailing the nearly year-old news with a fresh exclamation point.

So, was this just some belated bragging that Florida snagged a pizzeria from a “woke” state?

No, that’s not the case, either. Frank Pepe’s iconic New-Haven style pizza, which started serving pies in 1925 in that Connecticut city, still has its pizzeria there on Wooster Street.

And before coming to Florida, Frank Pepe’s pizzerias have taken root in a bunch of other “woke” states, including New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maryland.

And the Frank Pepe’s in Delray Beach isn’t even its first pizzeria in Florida. There was already a Frank Pepe’s that opened in Plantation two years ago — and not a peep from DeSantis about that.

So, what was DeSantis up to? Is this the first leg of DeSantis’ pizzeria tour of Florida?

If that were the case, it would have made more sense for him to visit another newish Delray Beach pizzeria, Death By Pizza, which not only is a born-in-Florida business but was just voted by Palm Beach Post readers in an online poll as the best local pizza parlor in the county.

More on Death by Pizza: Meet the 2024 ‘Best Pizza’ Champ, picked by Palm Beach Post readers!

But It turns out that Florida’s thin-crusted governor was on a dubious political mission. And Death By Pizza uses an electronic convection oven — the wrong kind of oven for DeSantis’ purpose.

“In Florida we will always support the right of pizza makers to ply their craft using coal-fired ovens,” DeSantis posted at the end of his Frank Pepe post — burying the lead, as we say in the news business.

Ah, now it makes sense: DeSantis was on a mission to praise coal. That’s because on Fox News, coal-reliant pizza makers have become almost as beloved as homophobic wedding-cake bakers.

And for DeSantis, a guy who wakes up every day looking for the fastest path to a Fox News microphone, making a trip to Delray Beach to pretend to be the patron saint of pizza is just the sort of dumbed-down “leadership” we’ve come to expect.

So, here’s the backstory to this visit.

In 2015, the New York City Council required businesses there that used open wood and coal fires to install pollution filters that removed as much as 75 percent particulate matter from the air.

Of special concern were tiny pollutants called “PM2.5”, which is particulate matter that is no more than 2.5 micrometers wide, a tiny fraction of the diameter of a strand of hair.

“At that diminutive size, it can get deep into the lungs and bloodstream, and over time, research suggests, it can ravage the body,” said a study published by Undark, a non-profit editorially independent digital magazine under the auspices of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT.

A health report published by the Health Effect Institute in Boston and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, focused on the dire health risks caused by this fine particulate pollution to people who live and work near its source.

“PM2.5 was responsible for a substantially larger number of attributable deaths than other more well-known risk factors (such as alcohol use … or high sodium intake)  and for an equivalent number of attributable deaths as high cholesterol and high body mass index,” it read.

So if you opened a wood- or coal-fired pizzeria in New York City after this law took effect in 2016, the new city law required you to install pollution controls to limit the PM2.5 particles released in the air.

As for the pizzerias that were burning coal before the law took effect, the city Department of Environmental Protection took eight years to finally decide that these older restaurants would not be grandfathered in, and they too, would have to get the controls.

The city also ruled that if these pollution controls, which cost as much as $20,000, were not economically feasible to the previously grandfathered pizzerias, they could apply for variances to waive installing them.

This decision represented a small fraction of the pizzerias in New York, but when The New York Post first reported this story last summer, it morphed into a fictional tale about woke governments trying to solve climate change by outlawing pizza.

“Climate change, the religion of the left,” lamented commentator Tomi Lahren on one of the many Fox News segments on the pizza ovens.

The usual suspects piled on. DeSantis joined the fray by abandoning his job in Florida to travel to New York City in June to eat coal-fired pizza on the air with Fox News featherweight Jesse Watters.

“They want to control behavior,” DeSantis told Watters during the televised segment. “We saw the same thing with COVID, a lot of that wasn’t about your health. It was about they wanted to control your behavior.

“So, they just don’t want people to be happy and make their own decisions.”

By that logic, Florida gas stations would still be offering leaded gasoline, and people would be left to “do their own research” on whether seat belts save lives and cigarettes cause cancer.

In other news, Florida’s anti-vax political posturing championed by DeSantis led to thousands of excess COVID deaths in the state, researchers found. That’s nothing to be proud about.

But DeSantis isn’t aiming for the thinkers here.

That’s why he raced to a Florida pizzeria this past week. The New York City pollution ruling on coal-burning businesses is set to go into effect at the end of this month.

No time to waste. DeSantis was just letting Fox News know he’s ready for pizza disinformation duty. Call him, Jesse. He’s got a plane with secret flight logs.

Meanwhile, back in the state DeSantis is supposed to be running for everybody’s benefit, the dereliction of duty to regulate leaky septic tanks, and agricultural nutrient runoff has once again created health alerts in Florida over the toxic algae blooms that are clogging Florida waterways.

I guess we’re letting the polluters of the state’s natural resources be happy and make their own decisions.

Frank Cerabino is a news columnist with The Palm Beach Post, part of the Gannett Newspapers chain.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: DeSantis' visit Delray Beach pizzeria shows his hunger for Fox News