Of all the things buried in the 3.5 million pages of Jeffrey Epstein, the one that has taken over the internet is this: the word “pizza” appears 800+ times.
Google searches for “Pizzagate” are spiking. TikTok videos with captions like “The elites sure love a pizza party” racked up millions of views. On X, users declared “Pizzagate is 100% real. All roads lead back to that little pizza parlour in DC.” Tucker Carlson devoted a segment to it. Reddit threads are treating the files like a cryptographic puzzle, convinced that if they just decode the right food word, the whole conspiracy will crack open.
The argument goes like this: in 2016, Pizzagate alleged that food words like “pizza” and “cheese” in Democratic operatives’ emails were secret code for child trafficking. That theory was supposedly debunked. But now here’s Jeffrey Epstein — an actual, convicted child sex trafficker — and his emails are full of pizza. Vindication, right?
No. And I can show you exactly why with one email thread that’s been circulating as supposed evidence.
The Email That Proves Nothing
One of the most-shared screenshots from the Epstein files is an August 2018 email exchange between Epstein and a man named Nathan Myhrvold. In it, Myhrvold writes that he’s going to Italy for three weeks to research his next book, then exclaims: “pizza!”
Epstein replies: “glad to hear on both. how did your bread book do=”
Myhrvold responds that “Modernist Bread has been great,” that he spent more on it than his previous book Modernist Cuisine, and that it’s “easily the most expensive nonfiction book in the history of mankind” in terms of development cost.
If you’re a Pizzagate truther, here’s what you see: Epstein associate says “pizza.” Confirmed. Code word. Move on.
Here’s what actually happened: Nathan Myhrvold is the former Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft who left tech to become one of the most obsessive food scientists on the planet. He published Modernist Cuisine in 2011, a 2,438-page, six-volume encyclopedia of cooking science. He followed it with Modernist Bread in 2017 — a five-volume, 2,600-page book that is literally the largest book about bread ever written. And after the bread book, he announced his next project: Modernist Pizza, a 1,708-page, three-volume guide to the science, history, and culture of pizza, which was published in October 2021 after years of research that took him to over 250 pizzerias across the globe.
This email is from August 2018. Myhrvold is telling Epstein he’s going to Italy to research pizza. Because he was writing a book about pizza. The “bread book” Epstein asks about is Modernist Bread.
There is no code here. This is a man talking about his job.
So Where Are All These “Pizza” Mentions Coming From?
First, when you dump 3.5 million pages of documents into a searchable database, common English words are going to appear hundreds of times. Pizza is one of the most popular foods in the United States. People email about it constantly. If you searched these files for “coffee” or “lunch” or “meeting,” you’d get thousands of hits too, and nobody would call that a code.
Second, not all of the “pizza” hits are even from the Epstein files. At least one of the most viral screenshots — the “headcount for pizza” email — is actually from a 2007 Stratfor email published by WikiLeaks years ago as part of an entirely separate archive. It’s an office logistics email from an intelligence firm in Austin, Texas. It has nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. But it got mixed into the collage of screenshots circulating on social media because when you’re looking for a pattern, everything starts to look like a pattern.
Third, the emails that are from the Epstein files and do mention pizza are overwhelmingly mundane. For instance, a message from a couple named Roy and Stephanie Hodges saying “the crew really appreciated the pizza today.” These are people who worked for or around Epstein talking about actual food.
But What About the Weird Ones?
Yes, some of the emails sound strange. “Let’s go for pizza and grape soda again.” That one, stripped of context and screenshotted, looks bizarre. Tucker Carlson zeroed in on an exchange between Epstein and his urologist, Harry Fisch, where they discuss an erectile dysfunction medication and then Fisch mentions pizza and grape soda. Carlson’s argument: health-obsessed billionaires don’t eat pizza and grape soda, so it must be code.
This is the logic of conspiracy: take something that sounds a little odd, remove all possible innocent explanations, and present the sinister reading as the only one left standing. But people talk in weird shorthands all the time. Inside jokes exist. People who are health-obsessed also sometimes eat pizza. The fact that an email sounds funny to you when you read it out of context years later is not evidence of a secret pedophile code.
Here’s what would be evidence: if investigators or prosecutors had flagged these terms as coded language in any indictment, plea agreement, or court filing related to Epstein’s actual crimes. They haven’t. The prosecutors who spent years building cases against Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell did not cite pizza references as evidence of anything. But before you go wild: they didn’t because they didn’t need to. The crimes were clear as day.
The Real Problem With the Pizzagate Revival
The reason this matters isn’t because Pizzagate truthers are going to decode a secret message in these emails. The reason it matters is that this exact kind of pattern-seeking pulls public attention away from what these documents actually contain, which is horrifying enough without any decoding.
Consider one email thread that tells you everything you need to know. On August 26, 2017, a woman named Ann Rodriquez, staff on Great St. James Island, Epstein’s private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, writes about getting food ready for the arrival of “girls.”
Epstein does not use a code word! No food metaphor. He literally just says serve the food when the girls arrive! Epstein casually references “girls” (not women) arriving at his island without bothering to disguise it at all.
This is the point. Jeffrey Epstein didn’t need a secret language. He had a private island, private jets, and a network of people who did what he asked without question. The horror of these documents isn’t hidden behind pizza metaphors. It’s right there on the surface, in plain text, for anyone willing to actually read it instead of running keyword searches.
0 Comments