The best way to watch the government…

Image of the Pentagon Pizza Index (The Puma Prensa / Hugh Cochrane)

By Hugh Cochrane, Staff Writer

The Government is watching you, and now you can watch them back, with the Pentagon Pizza Index.

The Pentagon Pizza Index (PPI) is a theory that was made by the Soviets back in the 1970s, and its philosophy is simple: if all the pizza places near the Pentagon experience a sudden surge of orders, something might be brewing. This theory was codenamed “PIZZINT” by the KGB.

This theory was all but confirmed in the 90s right before the Gulf War, with the owner of about 40 Dominos Pizza restaurants noticing an unusually high number of orders to government buildings in the days before the start of the Gulf War. 

More recently the PPI had a website created by a large group of people. It uses the ability to see how busy restaurants are on Google Maps, and  they track several different establishments-not just pizza. They managed to consolidate all of this data into the homescreen, making it easy to read.

The website exploded more recently during the Israel-Hamas war, with the most notable spike being right before Israel struck Iran, with the PPI having its data updated at 6:59 p.m. EST, with restaurants across the board all spiking massively, a minute later Israel struck Iran.

This data is not perfect, though. All the data comes from Google Maps, which can be inconsistent, and can also experience surges not related to international events, like a pizza party. On top of that, the people who work at the Pentagon might not order pizza, and might opt for Chinese food, which is not something listed on the PPI. With these inconsistencies the data isn’t 100% accurate.

Even though correlation does not always equal causation, it can be good to have a possible way to predict world events, even if it is a pretty inconsistent, funny way.