Somehow, in a few short days, gas stoves have gone from a thing that some people cook with to, depending on your politics, either a child-poisoning death machine or a treasured piece of national patrimony. Suddenly, everyone has an opinion. Gas stoves! Who could have predicted it?

The roots of the present controversy can be traced back to late December, when scientists published a paper arguing that gas stoves are to blame for nearly 13 percent of childhood-asthma cases in the United States. This finding was striking but not really new: The scientific literature establishing the dangers of gas stoves—and the connection to childhood asthma in particular—goes back decades. Then, on Monday, the fracas got well and truly under way when Richard Trumka Jr., a member of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, said in an interview with Bloomberg News that the commission would consider a full prohibition on gas stoves. “This is a hidden hazard,” he said. “Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.”

Just like that, gas stoves became the newest front in America’s ever-expanding culture wars. Politicians proceeded to completely lose their minds. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis tweeted a cartoon of two autographed—yes autographed—gas stoves. Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio declared simply, “God. Guns. Gas stoves.” Naturally, Tucker Carlson got involved. “I would counsel mass disobedience in the face of tyranny in this case,” he told a guest on his Fox News show.

No matter that Democrats are more likely to have gas stoves than Republicans, and, in fact, that the only states in which a majority of households use gas stoves—California, Nevada, Illinois, New York, New Jersey—are states that went blue in 2020. Why let a few pesky facts spoil a perfectly good opportunity to own the libs? The Biden administration, for its part, clarified yesterday that it has no intention of banning gas stoves. In the long run, though, this may prove to have been more a stay of execution than a pardon.

[Read: The gas-stove debate exemplifies the silliest tendencies of American politics]

Beyond the knee-jerk partisanship, the science of gas stoves is not entirely straightforward. Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University, suggested in her newsletter that the underlying data establishing the connection between gas-stove use and childhood asthma may not be as clear-cut as the new study makes it out to be. And because those data are merely correlational, we can’t draw any straightforward causal conclusions. This doesn’t mean gas stoves are safe, Oster told me, but it does complicate the picture. Switching from gas to electric right this minute probably isn’t necessary, she said, but she would make the change if she happened to be redesigning her kitchen.

Whatever the shortcomings of the available data, it’s clear that gas stoves are worse for the climate and fill our homes with pollutants we’re better off not inhaling. Brady Seals, a manager at the Rocky Mountain Institute and a lead author of the new paper, told me that even assuming the maximum amount of uncertainty, her work still suggests that more than 6 percent of childhood-asthma cases in the U.S. are associated with gas stoves.

Regardless of the exact science, gas stoves might be in trouble anyway. Statistically, they’re not all that deeply entrenched to begin with: Only about 40 percent of American households have one. Plus, induction stoves—a hyperefficient option that generates heat using electromagnetism—are on the rise. “We’re not asking people to go back to janky coils,” says Leah Stokes, a political scientist at UC Santa Barbara who has provided testimony on the subject of gas stoves before the U.S. Senate, and who is currently in the process of installing an induction stove in her home.

Rachelle Boucher, a chef who has worked in restaurants, in appliance showrooms, and as a private cook for such celebrity clients as George Lucas and Metallica, swears by induction. She started using it about 15 years ago and has since become a full-time evangelist. (In the past, Boucher did promotions for electric-stove companies, though she doesn’t anymore.) Induction, she told me, tops gas in just about every way. For one thing, “the speed is remarkable.” An induction stove top can boil a pot of water in just two minutes—twice as fast as a gas burner. For another, it allows for far greater precision: When you adjust the heat, the change is nearly instantaneous. “Once you use that speed,” Boucher said, “it’s weird to go back and have everything be so much harder to control.” Induction stoves also emit virtually no excess heat, reducing air-conditioning costs and making it harder to burn yourself. And they’re easier to clean.

[Read: Kill your gas stove]

Induction stoves do have minor drawbacks. Because they are flat and use electromagnetism, they aren’t compatible with all cookware, meaning that if you make the switch, you may also have to buy yourself a new wok or kettle. Flambéing and charring will also take a little longer, Boucher told me, but few home cooks are deploying those techniques on a regular basis. In recent years, induction has received the endorsement of some of the world’s top chefs, who have tended to be ardent gas-stove users. Eric Ripert, whose restaurant Le Bernardin has three Michelin stars, switched his home kitchens from gas to induction. “After two days, I was in love,” he told The New York Times last year. At his San Francisco restaurant, Claude Le Tohic, a James Beard Award–winning chef, has made the switch to induction. The celebrity chef and food writer Alison Roman is also a convert: “I have an induction stove by choice AMA,” she tweeted yesterday.

If it’s good enough for them, it’s probably good enough for us. At the moment, induction stoves are more expensive than the alternatives, although their efficiency and the fact that they don’t heat up the kitchen help offset the disparity. So, too, do the rebates included in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, which should kick in later this year and can amount to as much as $840. The price has been falling in recent years, and as it continues to come down, Stokes told me, she expects induction to overtake gas. A 2022 Consumer Reports survey found that although 3 percent of Americans have induction stoves, nearly 70 might consider going induction the next time they buy new appliances. “I think the same thing’s going to happen for induction stoves” as happened with electric vehicles, Stokes told me. In the end, culture-war considerations will lose out to questions of cost and quality. The better product will win the day, plain and simple.

Still, gas stoves’ foray into the culture wars likely means that at least some Republicans will probably scorn electric stoves now in the same way they have masks over the past few years. And this whole episode does have a distinctly post-pandemic feel to it: the concern about the air we’re breathing, the discussion of what precautions we ought to take, the panic and outrage in response. The new gas-stove controversy feels as though it has been jammed into a partisan framework established—or at least refined—during the pandemic. “I don’t know if this discourse that we’re seeing now could have happened five years ago,” Brady Seals told me. Whatever happens to gas stoves, the public-health culture wars don’t seem to be going anywhere.

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Negativity is by now so deeply ingrained in American media culture that it’s become the default frame imposed on reality. In large part, this is because since the dawn of the internet age, the surest way to build an audience is to write stories that make people terrified or furious. This is not rocket science: Evolution designed humans to pay special attention to threats. So, unsurprisingly, the share of American headlines denoting anger increased by 104 percent from 2000 to 2019. The share of headlines evoking fear surged by 150 percent.

If any event deserves negative coverage, the terrible coronavirus pandemic is it. And in the international media, 51 percent of stories in the first year of the pandemic were indeed negative, according to a 2020 study. But in the United States, a stunning 87 percent of the coverage was negative. The stories were negative even when good things were happening, such as schools reopening and vaccine trials. The American media have a particularly strong bad-news bias.

This permanent cloud of negativity has a powerful effect on how Americans see their country. When Gallup recently asked Americans if they were satisfied with their personal life, 85 percent said they were, a number that has remained remarkably stable over the past 40 years. But when Gallup asked Americans in January 2022 if they were satisfied with the direction of the country, only 17 percent said they were, down from 69 percent in 2000. In other words, there was a 68-percentage-point gap between the reality people directly experienced in their daily life and the reality they perceived through the media filter.

[Read: The power of negative thinking]

According to Ryan Streeter, the director of domestic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an expert on poll data, the people who are most pessimistic about the country are not the working class but highly educated and affluent people—the people, that is, who spend more time engaging with news media. The American right, for instance, finds itself in a state of perpetual apocalyptic alarm these days. Streeter observes that it’s not the poorer members of the conservative coalition who are pessimistic; it’s the affluent white Republicans who watch Tucker Carlson and believe the nation is on the verge of total destruction. Many of them believe that radical action, even violence, may be necessary to save it.

The first problem with all this pessimism is that it is ahistorical. Every era in American history has faced its own massive challenges, and in every era, the air has been thick with gloomy jeremiads warning of catastrophe and decline. Pick any decade in the history of this country, and you will find roiling turmoil.

But in all of those same decades, you will also find, alongside the chaos and the prophecies of doom, energetic dynamism and leaping progress. For example, the current historic moment is frequently compared with the 1890s, another period of savage inequality, rapid technological disruption, pervasive political dysfunction, and controversial waves of immigration. Someone alive in 1893—as unemployment surged from 3 percent to almost 19 percent among working-class Americans, as populism rose and spread, as class conflict and horrendous poverty became more rampant—might easily have concluded that this country was coming apart. And yet, the 1890s didn’t lead to American decline—they led to the American Century.

The second problem with the decline narrative is that it distorts reality. I’ve written my share of pessimistic stories over the past several years; no one can accuse me of being a Pollyanna. My basic take is that life in America today is objectively better than it was before but subjectively worse. We have much higher standards of living and many conveniences, but when it comes to how we relate to one another—whether in the realm of politics, across social divides, or in the intimacies of family and community life—distrust is rife, bonds are fraying, and judgments are harsh.

But that doesn’t mean the future isn’t going to be brighter than the present, or that America is in decline. The pessimists miss an underlying truth—a society can get a lot wrong if it gets the big thing right. And that big thing is this: If a society is good at unlocking creativity, at nurturing the abilities of its people, then its ills can be surmounted.

The economist Tyler Cowen suggests a thought experiment to illustrate this point.

Take out a piece of paper. In one column, list all of the major problems this country faces—inequality, political polarization, social distrust, climate change, and so on. In another column, write seven words: “America has more talent than ever before.”

Cowen’s point is that column B is more important than column A. Societies don’t decline when they are in the midst of disruption and mess; they decline when they lose energy. And creative energy is one thing America has in abundance.

Let’s look at all the ways humanity in general and America in particular continue to unleash human creativity:

First, over the course of many centuries, humanity has steadily reduced the amount of time wasted on drudgery. Turning on a tap is more time-efficient than drawing water from a well. Finding the closest ATM is more time-efficient than waiting in line at the bank. That’s oodles of time freed up to do something creative.

[Read: We need a new science of progress]

Productivity levels and living standards have increased so dramatically that it takes people less time to earn the money to buy the things they need. During the Middle Ages, an English laborer had to work 80 hours to pay for a pound of sugar. By 2021, an English laborer had to work only 1.89 minutes to do that. In 1800, it took 5.4 hours of work to buy 1,000 lumen-hours; in 1992, it took only 0.00012 hours of work for someone to light their home for six weeks.

From 1980 to 2018, the average amount of time a person had to work to afford the basket of commodities—energy, food, raw materials—that make up a typical middle-class lifestyle fell by 72 percent, according to the book Superabundance, by Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley. That, too, frees up a lot of time and resources that can be spent on other things.

Second, America invests an enormous amount in education. In 2018, Americans spent, on average, $14,400 on each elementary- and secondary-school student—34 percent more than the average for democracies with market-based economies. Americans spent $35,100 on every postsecondary-education student, double the average.

It’s hard to argue that that money is being efficiently spent. But one result of all of this spending is a significantly better-trained workforce: Since 1970, the share of American workers in high-skill jobs has increased from roughly 30 to 46 percent. Another result has been the continued superiority of the American university system. According to U.S. News & World Report’s rankings, eight of the top 10 universities in the world are American.

A better-educated workforce is a better-paid workforce. In the 1970s and ’80s, as America deindustrialized, wages did stagnate or decrease. But as the economy has more fully moved into the information age, that stagnation has dissipated. Michael R. Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute notes, based on Congressional Budget Office data, that real median household income grew by 26 percent from 1990 to 2019. When you throw in social benefits such as Social Security and unemployment insurance, median household income increased by 55 percent. For those in the bottom fifth of household income, the after-tax and transfer-income growth during that period was 74 percent. Strain observes in his book The American Dream Is Not Dead that three-quarters of adults raised in working-class homes have a higher inflation-adjusted income than their parents did. In 1993, 28 percent of American children lived in poverty. By 2019, that number was down to 11 percent. A better-educated society is a richer and more creative society.

We talk a lot about income inequality in this country. And it’s true that from 1979 to 2007, inequality widened. But since then, income inequality has fallen as working-class wages have risen and recent administrations have moved to redistribute wealth downward.

Throughout most of American history, white men have been the beneficiaries of big education investments. That has left the creative potential of most Americans unfulfilled. Today, we are doing a much better job of investing in people across the board. The gains are there for all to see.

For example, in 2004, the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington wrote a book called Who Are We?, in which he argued that Mexican Americans were failing to climb the education and opportunity ladder the way previous immigrant groups had. That argument could not be made today, because all of the evidence points in the opposite direction. In 2000, roughly a third of Hispanic students dropped out of high school. Sixteen years later, only 10 percent did. Around the turn of the 21st century, only a third of Hispanic high school graduates aged 18-24 were enrolled in college; today, nearly half are. Hispanic college-enrollment rates surpassed white enrollment rates in 2012. The incomes of Hispanic people rose faster than those of any other major group in America from 2014 to 2019. These trends mean that the U.S. has a lot more people with the skills to start companies, innovate, and create new things.

The third way society unlocks creativity is by helping people live healthier, longer, and more energetic lives. American longevity rates have taken a beating recently because of deaths of despair—alcoholism, opioid overdoses—and because of the pandemic. But the long-term trend is still positive. In 1960, the average American lived 70.1 years; by 2015, that figure was 78.9. From 1990 to 2017, lung-cancer-death rates among men fell by 51 percent. In roughly the same time period, breast-cancer-death rates among women fell by 40 percent, and prostate-cancer-death rates fell by 52 percent.

[From the October 2014 issue: What happens when we all live to 100?]

We have essentially created a new stage of life. Americans retire, on average, by their early to mid-60s, yet many now remain vibrant into their mid-80s. As a society, we haven’t begun to build the institutions to harness all of this talent. But those latent abilities are out there, waiting to be put to better use.

Fourth, the United States has an excellent innovation infrastructure. America ranks second in the Global Innovation Index, behind only Switzerland. It leads the world in the amount of foreign direct investment it attracts. It hosts the world’s most important capital markets, and they are growing. In 2011, for example, $45.4 billion of venture capital was invested in young, innovative American firms. In 2021, $332.8 billion was invested in such firms.

Especially since 2020, the U.S. has seen a surge in small-business formation. It turns out that if a pandemic drives people indoors and gives them little to do, a significant portion of those people will do something entrepreneurial: The number of Black small-business owners, for example, was 28 percent higher in the third quarter of 2021 than it was pre-pandemic. A study by the economists Ryan A. Decker and John Haltiwanger found that these new businesses were not just individuals selling knickknacks on Etsy. “Our findings strongly suggest that the pandemic surge in business applications was followed by true employer business creation with significant labor market implications,” they wrote.

These investments and entrepreneurial energies produce such a steady stream of innovations and improvements that it is easy to take them for granted. From 2008 to 2017, the U.S. economy expanded by 15 percent, but total energy consumption went down. Carbon emissions per capita have plummeted this century; we are now back down to levels from the 1910s. The cost of flying across the country has fallen roughly fivefold since the mid-1970s.

Not so long ago, if you wanted to keep up with the Joneses in your entertaining life, you needed a whole room full of equipment: a TV, a VCR, a game console, a stereo system, a telephone, a camera. Now it’s possible to replace all of that equipment—plus maps and atlases, magazines and newspapers, even books—with a single smartphone.

And I’ve yet to mention the two most impressive innovations of recent years—mRNA vaccines and the stunning gains in artificial intelligence. Who knows where AI will take us, but in the short term, it means that everybody can have a somewhat well-informed personal research assistant. As Tyler Cowen notes, we’re in the middle of a radical increase in the amount of intelligence in the world.

This growth has a healing effect. During the misery years of deindustrialization, factories closed, especially across the Midwest. Towns and cities were decimated, but many of those places have since recovered: Strain writes, citing a 2018 Brookings Institution report, that 62 percent of the most affected counties successfully transitioned to new industries; a further 22 percent of those counties enjoyed had strong economic performance over the previous two decades while maintaining their old manufacturing sectors.

We seem to be in the middle of a surge in manufacturing employment. During the first few months of COVID, American manufacturers cut about 1.3 million jobs. By the fall of 2022, those manufacturers had added about 1.4 million jobs, a net gain of 67,000 manufacturing jobs. That number could further rise as firms bring more manufacturing back home to reduce their exposure to Chinese supply chains.

This fall, Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, gave a fascinating talk to foreign correspondents in Tokyo about the global investments flowing into the United States from places such as Japan: Panasonic is investing $4 billion to make batteries in Kansas; Honda announced a $700 million investment in Ohio. The most striking element of the presentation was the maps showing where investments are being made. One map showed the locations of 56 mega-investments of more than $1 billion each—investments in auto, semiconductors, clean energy, and the like. Only two of those investments are in California; six are in Illinois, and five are in Iowa. After years of capital and wealth fleeing to the coasts, there are now signs of a rebound in the places that were left behind.   

I’ve bludgeoned you with statistics in order to make a point: Pessimism about our future is unwarranted. You may think that one major American political party has gone crazy, and I will agree with you. You can point to all of the ways in which life in America is infuriating and unjust, and I will agree with you there too. But the story of America is a story of convulsion and reinvention. We go through moments when the established order stops working. People and movements rise up, and things change. The culture is a collective response to the problems of the moment; as new problems become obvious, the culture shifts. We’ve been in the middle of one of those tumultuous transition periods since, I’d say, 2013. But 2022 evinced hopeful signs that we’re coming out of it.

If there is one lesson from the events of the past year, it is that open societies such as ours have an ability to adapt in a way that closed societies simply do not. Russia has turned violent and malevolent. China has grown more authoritarian and inept. Meanwhile, free democratic societies have united around the Ukrainians as they battle to preserve the liberal world order. And American voters seem to finally be adapting to the threat Donald Trump poses to our democracy, forming a robust anti-Trump coalition that will significantly lessen his chances of ever working in the White House again.

America is a wounded giant, and many of its wounds are self-inflicted. But America has always been a wounded giant. And it has always stumbled forward, driven by an inner turbine of ambition and aspiration that knows no rest.

Happiness, people will have you think, does not come from possessing things. It comes from love. Self-acceptance. Career satisfaction. Whatever. But here’s what everyone has failed to consider: the Ooni Koda 12-inch gas-powered outdoor pizza oven.

Since I purchased mine a year ago, my at-home pizza game has hit levels that are inching toward pizzaiolo perfection. Like Da Vinci in front of a blank canvas, I now churn out perfectly burnished pies entirely from scratch—dough, sauce, caramelized onions, and all. By merely looking at a pie, I can tell you whether the cornicione is too puffy or just right, if the crust could use a bit more leoparding, and whether the dough should have spent another day in the fridge. I am now, in a word, pizza-pilled.

But enlightenment is not without its consequences. The pies from my usual takeout spot just don’t seem to taste the same anymore. They’re still fine in that takeout-pizza way, but a certain je ne sais quoi is gone: For the first time, after opening up a pizza box and bringing a slice to my mouth, I am hyperaware of a limp sogginess to each bite, a rubbery grossness to the cheese. The cardinal rule of restaurants is that to-go food is never as good as the real deal, but even when my homemade pizzas sit around for too long, they don’t taste anywhere near that off.

Pizza delivery, it turns out, is based on a fundamental lie. The most iconic delivery food of all time is bad at surviving delivery, and the pizza box is to blame. “I don’t like putting any pizza in a box,” Andrew Bellucci, a legendary New York City pizza maker of Andrew Bellucci’s Pizzeria, told me. “That’s just it, really. The pizza degrades as soon as it goes inside,” turning into a swampy mess.

A pizza box has one job—keeping a pie warm and crispy during its trip from the shop to your house—and it can’t really do it. The fancier the pizza, the worse the results: A slab of overbaked Domino’s will probably be at least semi-close to whatever its version of perfect is by the time it reaches your door, but a pizza with fresh mozzarella cooked at upwards of 900 degrees? Forget it. Sliding a $40 pie into a pizza box is the packaging equivalent of parking a Lamborghini in a wooden shed before a hurricane.

[Read: The 3 big advances in the technology of the pizza box]

And yet, the pizza box hasn’t changed much, if at all, since it was invented in 1966. Then, boxes were shallow cardboard squares with flaps to lock them into place. Today, boxes are shallow cardboard squares with flaps to lock them into place. You’ll see the same design both in dinky spots for drunken college students and in the country’s most sought-after Neopolitan joints. Since the introduction of this corrugated vessel, humanity has landed on the moon, rolled out the internet, created cellphones, and invented combination air fryer–instant pots. But none of that matters: Ye olde pizza box refuses to die.

The problem with the pizza box starts with the pie itself. Let’s consider what makes the pizza so perfect—not the alchemy between sauce and cheese, but the texture. A classic hot pizza will have a tender and gooey center with a crust that’s as dry and crispy as an eggshell. Even a single slice of freshly cooked budget pizza can deliver a textural kaleidoscope that is unparalleled for its price.

None of these qualities fares well in a box. Unlike a tupperware of takeout chicken soup or palak paneer, which can be microwaved back to life after its journey to your home, the texture of a pizza starts to irreparably worsen after even a few minutes of cardboard confinement. “You’ll never get a pizza out of a box that tastes as good as it would have before it went in,” Scott Wiener, a New York pizza-tour guide and the author of Viva la Pizza!: The Art of the Pizza Box, told me.

The basic issue is this: A fresh pizza spews steam as it cools down. A box traps that moisture, suspending the pie in its own personal sauna. After just five minutes, Wiener said, the pie’s edges become flaccid and chewy. Sauce seeps into the crust, making it soggy. All the while, your pizza is quickly losing heat. After 15 minutes, the cheese has congealed into dollops of rubber. And after 45 minutes, your pizza deteriorates into something else entirely. “It’ll be chewy and dry at the same time,” Anthony Falco, a pizza consultant and the author of Pizza Czar, told me. “And there’s nothing you can do to fix it.”

How to get a hot pizza from the oven to your doorstep is a centuries-old dilemma. When pizza was merely winter sustenance for paupers in 19th-century Naples, pies were loaded into stufas, copper containers that young lads would balance on their heads. Things got weird fast when pizza made its way to the U.S. At Lombardi’s in New York City, perhaps the country’s first pizzeria, lore has it that lukewarm pies were rolled up with twine and reheated on factory furnaces by famished laborers. After World War II, when to-go pizza began to take flight, we finally got the progenitor of the pizza box: flimsy paperboard containers similar to today’s cake boxes. By 1949, when The Atlantic sought to introduce America to the pizza, the package was already something to lament: “You can take home a pizza in a paper box and reheat it, but you should live near enough to serve it within twenty minutes or so. People do reheat pizza which has become cold, but it isn’t very good; the cheese may be stringy, and the crust rocklike at the edges, soggy on the bottom.”

[Read: The art of pizza-making]

And then came the modern pizza box. In 1966, the owner of a small Michigan pizza chain called Domino’s enlisted a local packaging company to construct a box out of corrugated cardboard that would better withstand takeout and delivery. Think about any recent Amazon box you’ve gotten in the mail, and you’ll see what makes this box different: Corrugation produces a layer of wavy cardboard between a top and bottom sheet, sort of like a birthday cake. The design creates thick, airy walls that both protect the precious cargo within a pizza box and insulate the pie’s heat while also allowing some steam to escape.

This new take on the box ushered in a takeout-pizza revolution. “It was a pleasure to hand one to a customer and feel confident that it wouldn’t sag open and drop the pizza on his porch,” Tom Monaghan, Domino’s founder, wrote in his 1986 autobiography, at which point the chain already had several thousand stores worldwide. And these boxes do have a lot going for them: They are dirt cheap to mass produce, can stack on top of one another without compromising the pizza within, ship flat to nestle into cramped shops, and are deceptively easy to fold. (At the World Pizza Games 2022—yes, a real thing—the first-place winner folded five boxes in 20 seconds.)

We’ve gotten a couple of pizza-delivery innovations in the past few decades: the insulated heat bag—that ubiquitous velcroed duffel used to keep pies warm on their journey—those mini-plastic-table things, and … well, that is mostly it. No pizza box in widespread use today is significantly better at keeping a pizza fresh than the one Domino’s invented all those years ago. Indeed, if any pizza holds up well in the old-fashioned box, it’s the chain variety. These pies run drier to avoid a case of the pizza slops. But there is a lot more to pizza than Domino’s and Pizza Hut.

With no better options, some pizzerias are now rejiggering their recipes to better survive the box, dropping their oven temperatures and adding the cheese beneath the sauce. “Every single pizza that I put in a box I know is going to be, let’s say, at least 10 percent not as good as it could have been,” Alex Plattner, the owner of Cincinnati’s Saint Francis Apizza, told me. Others dream of better days. “After smoking a lot of weed, I have come up with a lot of ideas for a better box,” said Bellucci, the New York City pizza maker.

If there is a single food item poised for some technological ingenuity, it’s pizza. Food trends come and go, like Quiznos and kale, but to-go pizza is timeless, even immortal: When the pandemic wrecked the restaurant industry in 2020, pizza sales managed to tick up; billions of pizzas are delivered in this abomination of a box every year. In other words, the pizza box is a market failure that is screaming to be, well, disrupted. We are simply eating a worse version of one of the most popular foods around, all because of the deficiencies of something that seems so eminently fixable.

The thing is, though, an improved box exists. “There are products out there that are better,” said Wiener. “But all of them have problems.” And he would know. Wiener’s Brooklyn apartment includes a Guiness World Record–winning collection of 1,750 pizza boxes. They’ve been meticulously cataloged by spreadsheet and stuffed into a closet. Just about all of these boxes are the common corrugated kind, but a special few are honest attempts to move beyond it. “Some of them are weird prototypes—I have an inflatable pizza box from Denmark,” he said. “I have a pizza box that becomes a spatula. It’s the weirdest.”

Corporate America and garage inventors alike have sought to pioneer a better box. In 2015, one cash-flush Silicon Valley start-up, Zume, created the Pizza Pod™️: a round, two-piece spaceship of a container made from compressed sugarcane fiber. Let a pizza sit inside it and the fibers will absorb the errant moisture better than cardboard, keeping the pie crisp. Last year, the German brand PIZZycle debuted the tupperware of pizza containers, a reusable vessel studded with ventilation holes on its sides. Even Apple—that Apple—has patented its own round pizza box exclusively for its famished Cupertino office workers. And perhaps the most ingenious container I’ve found is from an Indian company called VentIt. The box takes the normal corrugated vessel and thins out part of the cardboard at the top and bottom, creating venting channels that, at least according to VentIt’s own research, achieve something miraculous: reducing 25 percent more steam inside the box while also maintaining the pizza’s temperature.

A better pizza box is not science fiction. Even Apple filed a patent for its own version in 2010. (United States Patent and Trademark Office)

So we know it’s not a question of ingenuity: We can construct better pizza boxes, and we already have. The real issue is cost. No superior pizza box—from VentIt, Zume, wherever—can come close to matching the price of simple corrugated cardboard, and in a restaurant industry with such tight margins, the math is hard to deny. Until customers overcome their Stockholm syndrome, why would pizzerias fork up more money for something that immediately lands in the trash? “The problem is that everybody expects this box and nobody’s too offended by it,” Wiener said. “There hasn’t been enough push for something different.”

[Read: Nothing is cooler than going out to dinner]

For now, we’re still waiting for the perfect box—one that is as cheap, stackable, foldable, and sustainable as its corrugated brethren. “When ALL factors are considered, corrugated cardboard has proven to be the best available material for packaging pizza,” John Correll, a pizza-packaging inventor with 43 patents, told me over email. “For years, other materials have been suggested and tried, but they each have problems.”

There are other issues too. Five companies control 70 percent of the cardboard market in the U.S., a level of consolidation that is rampant across the American economy. Independent pizzerias are everywhere, but the pizza chains still dominate takeout and delivery. Domino’s alone accounts for nearly 40 percent of delivery-pizza sales in the U.S.—on par with all regional chains and mom-and-pops combined. Perhaps these big companies are stifling real pizza-box innovation. “We have a solution that, for the most part, delivers the hot product to a customer in a way that also works for our operations,” Zach Halfmann, Domino’s director of operations innovation, told me. “We haven’t found a need to rethink it.”

And so we must find peace with this cursed container. Its simplicity is its value, and precisely why it’s so hard to give up. Like a Christmas tree or a cast-iron pan, what the pizza box lacks in perfectly engineered function, it makes up for in familiarity, tradition, and even populism.

Your life is different from your grandparents’, but this is quite literally your grandparents’ pizza box—and also Elon Musk’s pizza box, and Joe Biden’s, and Oprah Winfrey’s. It is a custom that brings us together in a kind of communion—sogginess and all. “There’s no wealthy-person version of the pizza box,” Carol Helstosky, a University of Denver professor and the author of Pizza: A Global History, told me. The pizza box is just the pizza box. But hey, at least we’ve moved past the stufa.