The Ranch Dressing Epidemic: Will it cripple our great Republic?

[old timey villain]

I just started a job at a pizza place. I start graduate school next fall so I just needed a job now to keep me going until then.

The place is really cool. It's one of those trendy, hearth oven places where customers can make their own custom personal pizza with lots of fresh ingredients. They have stuff like sun dried tomatoes, artichoke hearts, capicoa, buffalo mozz, fresh vegetables and your typical meat toppings, so you can pretty much make any kind of pizza you want.

You'd think that when one has the ability to customize their pizza exactly to their liking, they wouldn't need to wash it down with any condiments. Oh how very wrong I was. I quickly learned that the most frequent customer request was, "can I get some ranch with this?" or even better, "can I get A FEW cups of ranch with this?" Literally almost every time I give someone their pizza, they want to drown it in ranch dressing. And they know our ranch is free so they let it flow like running water.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of ranch dressing, not necessarily the bottle stuff, but when you make it fresh like many restaurants do then it's delicious. I love it on a hearty salad and of course it's great with raw vegetables. But pizza?? I remember back in grade school a lot of kids would slather ranch dressing over their pizzas, but I always chalked it up to something that kids do. As it turns out old habits die hard. People LOVE ranch dressing on their pizza. We even have a marinara ranch sauce that's really popular, cutting out the middleman altogether.

Has America's love affair with this calorie and msg laden condiment gone too far? I mean, I just don't understand why people are putting it on their pizzas now. I imagine the Italian immigrant street vendors of yesteryear are spinning in their grave at the thought of it. Ranch is no longer a guilty pleasure of Americans. I believe it has become an addiction, and I am now an enabler.

Do YOU enjoy ranch dressing on pizza and other dishes or do you think it's simply gilding the lily to use it excessively?

[old timey villain]

It's funny you say this, because for years, my sister-in-law and I have done this, while everyone else in our family thinks it is weird. I love sauces - ketchup, barbeque, and ranch, specifically, and dip a lot of stuff in one of those three. My Subway subs often have barbeque sauce and ranch dressing on it.

It's not as bad on sandwiches. I mean I love to put a little ranch on a BLT. It's just weird to me to put it on pizza.

[old timey villain]

Ranch on pizza is very common here.  I wouldn't slather my pizza with ranch, but I love dipping it in ranch, or even better, a ranch/marinara mix.

It seems to be more popular in the south, don't know why though.