“When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, That’s amore…”

So sang Dean Martin. What’s a pizza pie? I often wondered. Now I know – cos I’ve just had some – it’s just a pizza with a massive crust, and miraculously by the power of chemistry that very crust was pumping me full of antioxidants.

Yes, the life of a journalist is a tough one. Here in the ACS press room we are given free pizza. Hooray. But of course, there is no such thing as a free lunch. The pizza was to highlight graduate student Jeffery Moore’s research at the University of Maryland. He has tinkered with baking conditions and fermentation processes in dough and shown that longer baking times and higher temperatures lead to more antioxidants forming in the dough.

And that is the very dough they fed us. It might make up for the lack of natural light here in the journalist’s cave – surely being outside in the sun and all that vitamin D would be better for us than a pile of greasy pizza – antioxidants or not?