Hold onto your aprons as the tri-state pizza front has grown hot again following the introduction of a bill in Connecticut’s senate to declare pizza the state’s official food. It’s only been a few years since the governors from Connecticut and New Jersey engaged in vicious battle over twitter, after Governor Lamont declared that we had the best pizza in the United States. A while later, Connecticut Senate Democrats returned fire after Governor Murphy announced that New Jersey was the pizza capital of the world. In the wake of these ongoing hostilities, the Connecticut Legislature took its first shot at enshrining pizza’s status here in the Nutmeg State into law, introducing a bill in the house. The world took notice with celebrities from Stephen Colbert to Dan Rather weighing in. While the bill passed out of the house, it died in the senate and the pizza war went cold. That is until just a few weeks ago with the senate’s bold new action sure to reignite the passions of pizza partisans everywhere.
To conduct pizza legal research of your own here in Connecticut, your best bet is taking advantage of the search functionality of the General Assembly’s website: https://www.cga.ct.gov/default.asp. There you can run an Advanced Bill and Document Search by clicking the Bill Info tab and selecting it under the Search heading. From there you can specify what materials you want to search and decide what years you want to cover. Doing so for all Bills and Related and for the word Pizza in the Document Text for the last 5 years helped me find the two bills mentioned above. Do your part in the great pizza wars and learn how to follow legislative action as part of your research toolkit. Visit us at the reference desk to learn more!