8 The Biggest Pizza in the World

Chapter 8 The Biggest Pizza in the World Instead of going out for recess, we all rushed over to the school library. Our media specialist, Mrs. Roopy, was in there eating her lunch. "To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?" she asked. That's grown-up talk for "What are you doing here?" "We need to see The Guinness Book of World Records right away!" I told her. I was all out of breath. Mrs. Roopy put her hand on my forehead. "A.J., are you feeling okay?" she asked. "I've never heard you say you wanted to

read a book before. Maybe I should call an ambulance and get you to the hospital." "He's fine," said Neil the nude kid. "We need to do some research, Mrs. Roopy," said Andrea. "We want to find out how big the biggest pizza in the world is." Mrs. Roopy got The Guinness Book of World Records off a shelf, and we all gathered around her to look at it. "Let's see," she said, leafing through the book. "Here's a man who balanced a refrigerator on his teeth for ten seconds. That's remarkable! And here's a man who

ate a whole bicycle. That's amazing!" "Nothing about giant pizzas in there?" asked Ryan. Finally Mrs. Roopy found the section on food, and there it was: the biggest pizza in the world was made in South Africa in 1990. It was 386 feet around, and it had 1,764 pounds of cheese and 1,985 pounds of tomato sauce on it. "WOW!" Michael said, which is "MOM" upside down. "That's a big pizza!" "How could we possibly make a pizza bigger than that one?" asked Ryan. That's when I came up with the greatest idea in the history of the world. "Our school collected over 3,000 pounds of food," I said. "We could use the food from the food drive to make our pizza!" "The food we collected is for hungry people, A.J.," Mrs. Roopy said. "It would be

wrong to use that food just to break a world record." "Nobody puts beans or soup on pizza anyway," said Ryan. Okay, so maybe my idea wasn't so great after all. We all thought and thought and thought. I thought so hard that I thought my head was going to explode. Suddenly, Andrea got this gleam in her eye. "I know!" she said. "The Six Moms can supply the ingredients for our pizza! Our school could be the first customer of our moms' new catering company!" "Yeah!" said Emily, who always agrees with everything Andrea says. It was a good idea, I had to admit. But there wasn't any lightbulb over Andrea's head, and I wasn't about to admit out loud that she had a good idea.

"That's the dumbest idea in the history of the world," I said.