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Forever Pizza makes your favorite food eternal

Turns your love of pie into an eternal art object.

Amanda Kooser
Freelance writer Amanda C. Kooser covers gadgets and tech news with a twist for CNET. When not wallowing in weird gear and iPad apps for cats, she can be found tinkering with her 1956 DeSoto.
Amanda Kooser
2 min read
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This pizza will never go out of style.

Steph Mantis

Forever Pizza is the Han-Solo-in-carbonite of the food world. It's a slice of real pizza permanently cocooned in a see-through acrylic brick. It will never get moldy and it will never know what it's like to be eaten. It's pizza for all eternity.

The artistic endeavor comes from pizza-obsessed Brooklyn artist Steph Mantis, who first encased pizza slices in resin for an art show years ago. "I never thought I'd end up making it again, in any capacity," she writes. 

But she did anyway and you can pick up a slice of pepperoni or plain for $200 (£156, AU$274). 

The pizza itself comes from Mantis's family's pizzeria, Pizza By Alex in Maine, which specializes in personal-sized, Greek-style pies. The artist's father cooked the pizzas used in the art project.

"When you embed organic matter in a plastic, it often reacts in unpredictable ways," Mantis writes. She let a Forever Pizza prototype encased in acrylic sit around for two years to make sure the slice wouldn't interact with its transparent tomb and change in some way. It remained stable.

You will notice the pizza slices look extra-done. That's because the acrylic darkens the cheese and toppings as it cures. Mantis experimented with ways to make the slices look more appetizing, but decided to leave them as they were.

Mantis's work stands as a testament to humanity's obsession with pizza while challenging the ephemeral nature of the popular food. It's just too bad you can't get a slice of Forever Pizza with pineapple.

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