When I hear "artisanal" I think of ugly because that's what we call it when the bread/cake/whatever turns out looking funny at my house. "Artisanal" is a joke, Safeway has branded it's bread as such for several years.

Calling something artisanal is no different than using sausage (which means made with meat) to call a veggie patty a veggie sausage patty. We have gone so far overboard with 'renaming' a food that the original name has lost its meaning.

We've always promoted the idea of simply ignoring food terms (e.g., organic, free trade, local, artisan, etc.) and making as much of the food one consumes from scratch. In the case of pizza, it's very easy to make from scratch dough and tomato sauce and make your own "artisan" food. After all, the home cook is the true artisan and not a large food brand or restaurant chain. Cook more at home and ignore labels.

Our two cents...

Ditto what Scordo says. I never trust the labels that food manufacturers give their "food." I only consider something artisanal if I watched it be made in someone's kitchen. Only organic if I saw it be grown and/or trust the farmer.

I know someone who works at Dominos and he said they use the same pizza dough for the artisan pizzas, they just shape it differently. Quite tricksy, no?

I imagine it's also an internal marketing tool to encourage employees to be more involved with their work, along the same lines of Subway's "sandwich artists", Walmart's associates, Starbucks' barristas.

I just think of it as another product line - its just a name the company gives it, it doesn't really have much meaning to it.

I did try a free Domino's artisanal pizza yesterday and i think it tasted better than their regular pizza - because of the combo of ingredients on top - I didn't expect a new crust or anything mind-blowingly different from it.

I think it's important to be aware of what words really mean when we choose our foods. "Organic" and "Fair Trade" are regulated, for example, but consumers often think they mean more than they do. Other words, like "artisan," "natural," and "farm fresh" (my personal favorite) can mean whatever a manufacturer/store want them to mean, so it's important to be careful. I don't think the solution is to reject all food adjectives, but rather to know what each one means (if anything) and what backs up that claim (if anything).

No, I am not fooled. I can tell the difference between food and food-like substances.

It's almost obscene when big corporations like Domino's use these terms, and ironic since their big, mass-produced, polluting habits destroy small family businesses and hurt communities in the long run anyway. The FTC is clearly not doing its job in protecting consumers from lying-dog corporations.

It's all hype, sort of like the "Farmer's Market" that the local grocery store promotes. They buy veggies, that ultimately came from farmers somewhere, and sell them in their store and now it's a Farmer's Market?

A couple of years ago I saw an ad for soup that included "farm grown vegetables" in their list of why their soup was better than the competitors. Really? Are they implying that the other companies synthesize their veggies in a laboratory or manufacture them like plastic toys?

"Artisan" is mega-food-corp-speak for "Fancy enough that we can fool people into paying way more for it." I always read the labels, not only what it's made out of, but where it's from.

And I don't trust any publicly traded food company to tell the truth.

I never think to notice how something is worded. This is the first time I even heard that these companies use the word "artisan".

@ccp mbd, sausage doesn't mean "made with meat" (if you're talking about its etymology), it means salted.