Scott Wiener is an expert on pizza. He operates Scott's Pizza Tours, which offers guided tours around New York City's finest pizzerias. As a connoisseur of the pie, he has tasted them all--and collected the boxes in which they are shipped.
His collection of 1,550 boxes from pizzerias as far away as McMurdo Station, Antarctica doesn't consist of used specimens. Wiener preserves unused ones for posterity. Atlas Obscura reports:
But the journey to the world’s largest pizza-box collection started in New Jersey, when Wiener spent much of 2009 rounding the state to choose its best pizzerias with Peter Genovese, food writer for Newark’s Star-Ledger. In Genovese’s Munchmobile, a van topped with a gigantic fake hot dog, Wiener and other readers visited 333 pizzerias. “Visiting so many places, you start to notice differences,” he says. He fixated on the pizza boxes. “Pizza boxes are not all the same, and that means they’re interesting,” he says.
Photo: Scott Wiener