In Alaska, Fast Food Often Can Take Days

When Walter Shane gets a yen for pizza, he orders it from any one of a number of restaurants here. Then he waits.

Days.

Shane lives on St. Paul Island in the Pribilofs, in the middle of the Bering Sea about 750 miles southwest of his favorite pizza parlor.

It can take three days for Shane, his wife, Julie, and their 8-year-old daughter, Martha, to satisfy their cravings.

“It is just a normal thing now,” Julie Shane said recently as she waited for three pizzas and 24 McDonald’s hamburgers to arrive on the next Reeve Aleutian Airways flight from Anchorage. “French fries don’t travel well, but pizzas always do great,” she said.

Shane said the cost of getting pizza to the Pribilofs is the cost of the pizza plus $23 for shipping.

Many residents in Alaska’s outlying villages order pizza and other, uh, fast foods for special occasions. Although no one guarantees a piping hot pepperoni pie on arrival, many restaurants are more than happy to speed a pizza to the airport.

Orders are often delayed by canceled flights and bad weather.

In Juneau, Domino’s franchisee Fred Tallmadge and his wife, Helen, have delivered pizzas by boat to fishermen.

“Fishermen would call on the marine radio. We’d pick up the call,” he said.

The fishermen describe their location and Tallmadge, toting a hot pizza, finds the hungry crew.

Tallmadge has delivered up to 50 pizzas in one shipment to the southeast Alaska community of Kake--population 682.

“It’s a lot of fun,” he said. “We tape it all together with duct tape, haul it to the airport. . . . It drives the other passengers crazy to have 50 baked pizzas as cargo.”