Pizza Hut veered sharply into the avant garde when it announced this week that it would sell pizza by the slice. But is America ready for the nation's best pizza chain to try something even more outlandish?

For the first time ever, Pizza Hut—taking its cues, no doubt, from the shockingly visceral cuisine of René Redzepi and the technical mastery of Joan Roca—will offer to the public a pizza made with dough that is touched by human hands. Ad Age reports:

The new product comes as chain restaurants scramble to appeal to millennials and adapt to changing consumer preferences in general. Research on millennials generally finds that they favor fast-casual chains over fast-food chains and that they like convenience, premium ingredients, choice and healthier offerings.

Will this new "hand-tossed pizza" prove to be too much of a turn-off to non-millennial pizza consumers, who prefer food that is inconvenient, made with shitty ingredients, and unhealthy? Only time will tell. Fortunately for normal Americans, Pizza Hut will continue to offer "pan, thin' n crispy and stuffed-crust pizza" with crust that has never been touched by mankind. Robot Crust Pizza Unsullied by Human Folly has been popular in this great nation for quite a long time, and frankly, we find this whole "hand-tossed" business to be a bit French/ Communist/ Gay.

The real test of the plan's success will come in the state of Rhode Island, vast swaths of which are a culinary wasteland where little (if any) "good" pizza is available for sale, according to the "Pizza Belt" theory of our own pizza expert, Max Read. If those Rhode Islanders can get used to the bizarre idea of "hand-tossed" pizza, one imagines, anyone can.

[Pic via]