No, you haven’t read this text before. The column from two weeks ago was about pepperoni pizza. Here the subject is totally different: mozzarella pizza. Maybe you think I’m a pizza maniac – with good reason.
The reason I return to pizza is a sensational study done by Fatec Sebrae teachers and students. They take pizza as a parameter to assess the purchasing power of the population in various parts of São Paulo.
Which pizza is more expensive: one for R$29 or another for R$51.80?
The answer is not as obvious as it seems. “Expensive” can be a notion relative to the amount of money you have to spend.
In the case of the two pizzas above, the first corresponds to the average prices in Lajeado, the poorest neighborhood in the city, in the far east; the second is from the district of Alto de Pinheiros, the richest in the capital, in the west.
Putting the average income and the price of pizza in the mathematical formula of the study, the following conclusion is reached: if altodepinheirer were to pay, for a pizza, the same slice of his budget that lajeader pays, the price would be R$ 131.60.
Inverting the reasoning, the pizza from Lajeado would cost 13.30 if the value corresponded to the same fraction of income paid by the wealthy fellow citizen from the west.
That is, the poor pay more for pizza. Nothing surprising, but rarely designed in such a didactic way.
The study in question is called Mozzarella Index. It is sort of a São Paulo version of the Big Mac Index, created by the British magazine The Economist to compare the purchasing power of several countries based on the price of two hamburgers, lettuce, cheese, special sauce, onions and pickles on sesame seed buns.
(Parenthesis to say the index name is “mozzarella” and the leaf forces me to write “mozzarella”, but I think it should be “mozzarella”, as it has always been on pizzeria menus. I write “mozzarella” under protest.)
Finally, this index, henceforth called IM, maps the pizzerias in a given region based on Google Maps coordinates and then collects the price of the simple cheese pizza, the most basic and least expensive flavor.
Once the prices are averaged, it is divided by the average income of the district, and the quotient is multiplied by 100. The resulting number is the index itself.
The highest MI in São Paulo is 1.20 and it is in Perus, north zone, the second poorest district in the city. There, pizza costs BRL 36.30 – higher than the amount paid by residents of Vila Sônia (BRL 35.90), the 16th richest of the 96 districts of São Paulo, in the West Zone.
In other words, the Perus pizza is the most expensive of all in relative terms. And the one in Vila Sônia is the cheapest.
In absolute numbers, the highest price is in Moema: R$62 for a mozzarella pizza, complete nonsense. The smallest is in Capão Redondo, R$ 27. But guess who spends more of the budget? Yes, Capon! Caponers have IM 0.70, against 0.59 for moemers.
Eagerly awaiting the revelations of the Coxinha Index and the Brigadeiro de Leite Ninho Index.
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