Food truck serves oddly shaped pizza slices in Pittsburgh as lesson on gerrymandering

A food truck called Gerry’s Partisan Pizza served up free slices of pizza in Oakland on Friday — but there was a catch.

The slices were cut into odd shapes, rather than the standard neat triangles. Their sizes varied.

Each piece was meant to serve as a reminder about gerrymandering, said Simon Radecki, organizing manager for Pennsylvania for Represent Us, an organization that describes itself as the nation’s leading cross-partisan anti-corruption group. The group is sponsoring Gerry’s Partisan Pizza as it makes a nationwide tour to raise awareness about gerrymandering.

At Gerry’s Partisan Pizza (which is offering free pizza in Oakland till 2 p.m. today), pizza slices are served up in weird sizes and shapes, not quite the neat triangles people want. It’s meant to teach people about the problems with gerrymandering. pic.twitter.com/jVAXNBbY1Q

— Julia Felton (@JuliaFelton16) November 5, 2021

Gerrymandering refers to the controversial manipulation of legislative districts and political maps to cherry-pick voters.

“The issue is the people who decide what the boundaries look like are politicians themselves,” Radecki explained. “When they draw those lines unfairly because of things like splitting up cities or communities for their own political benefit, that’s gerrymandering.”

State lawmakers are in the process of collecting data and public input before introducing legislation that redraws the lines for new congressional maps. Locally, Pittsburgh’s City Council and Pittsburgh Public School District’s school board are also undergoing similar reapportionment processes.

By cutting up pizzas in ways that don’t make sense, Radecki said, the food truck aims to demonstrate how cutting up legislative districts in ways that don’t make sense can also be problematic.

“If you ask the guy behind the counter for a pizza slice and you get something other than what you ask for, you’re not going to get what you enjoy,” he said. “It’s the same thing with gerrymandering.”

The food truck was prepared to cook, gerrymander and serve a few hundred pizzas, said Tony Dagli, one of the cooks.

Initiatives like these can help raise awareness so that people know to pay attention to an important process that occurs after each census, said Father Daniel Straughn, a priest at Mary Queen of Peace Parish in Mount Washington and South Side.

“I believe that the more people that get involved, the better off we’re all going to be,” Straughn said. “This particular situation with gerrymandering can be considered a corruption of our democracy by allowing the elected officials to choose the electorate instead of allowing the electorate to choose the elected officials.”

He encouraged people to contact their representatives to push for a fair and equitable reapportionment process.

People can also attend public meetings on the subject, either in person or online, said Kyle Hynes, a freshman at Carnegie Mellon University who said he likes to attend events such as this to raise awareness about gerrymandering.

After the 2016 election, he said, he was looking at political maps and wondered why they “looked a little weird.” That prompted him to do some research about how those lines are drawn and why they’re not always drawn equally.

“They’re like that because politicians want them to look like that,” he said.

Since then, he’s become more involved in making other people aware. The more people who can speak up against it — and let elected officials know that they won’t vote for them again if they support gerrymandering — the better chance of stopping the practice, he said.

“It makes an impact on who your representative is and how secure that representative feels,” Hynes said. “Ultimately, it has a huge impact on the policies that are implemented.”