Of all the things buried in Jeffrey Epstein’s 3.5 million pages, the one that has taken over the internet is this: the word “pizza” appears 800+ times.
Google searches for “Pizzagate” explode. TikTok videos with captions like “The Special Ones love a pizza party” have garnered millions of views. On X, users declared that “Pizzagate is 100% real. All roads lead back to that little pizza place in DC.” Tucker Carlson contributed a segment to it. Reddit threads treat the files like a cryptographic puzzle, confident that once they figure out the right food name, the whole conspiracy will unravel.
The argument goes like this: in 2016, Pizzagate alleged that food terms like “pizza” and “cheese” in emails from Democratic operatives were secret code for child trafficking. That idea is said to have been dismissed. But now here’s Jeffrey Epstein — a real, convicted child trafficker — and his pizza-filled emails. Confirmation, right?
No. And I can show you exactly why in one email thread it’s been circulating as evidence.
An Email That Proves Nothing
One of the most shared screenshots of the Epstein files is an August 2018 email exchange between Epstein and a man named Nathan Myhrvold. In it, Myhrvold writes that he will go to Italy for three weeks to research his next book, and exclaims: “pizza!”
Epstein replies: “I’m glad to hear from you both. How did your breadbook do=”
Myhrvold replies that “Modern Bread has been good,” that he spent more money on it than his previous book. Modernist Cuisineand that it is “the most expensive non-fiction book in human history” in terms of development costs.
If you’re a fan of the Pizzagate truth, here’s what you see: Epstein’s partner says “pizza.” It is confirmed. Voice code. Go ahead.
Here’s what really happened: Nathan Myhrvold is a former Microsoft CTO who left tech to become one of the world’s most ambitious food scientists. You have published Modernist Cuisine in 2011, a 2,438-page, six-volume encyclopedia of culinary science. He followed it too Modern bread in 2017 – a five-volume, 2,600-page book that is the largest book on bread ever written. And after the bread book, he announced his next project: Modern Pizzaa 1,708-page, three-volume guide to the science, history, and culture of pizza, published in October 2021 after years of research that took him to more than 250 pizza joints around the world.
This email is from August 2018. Myhrvold tells Epstein that he is going to Italy to research pizza. Because he was writing a book about pizza. “The book of bread” Epstein asked about Modern bread.
There is no code here. This man is talking about his work.
So Where Do All These “Pizzas” Come From?
First, if you dump 3.5 million pages of documents into a searchable database, common English words will appear hundreds of times. Pizza is one of the most popular foods in the United States. People email about it all the time. If you search these files for “coffee” or “lunch” or “meeting,” you’ll get thousands of hits again, and no one can call that a code.
Second, not all “pizza” hits appear in the Epstein files either. At least one particularly incriminating screenshot — the “pizza headcount” email — is actually from a 2007 Stratfor email published by WikiLeaks years ago as part of an entirely separate archive. Mail for office supplies from an intelligence firm in Austin, Texas. It has nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. But it’s combined with a collage of screenshots circulating on social media because when you look for a pattern, everything starts to look like a pattern.
Third, emails that there is from the Epstein files and do think pizza is a normal thing. For example, a message from a couple named Roy and Stephanie Hodges that says “the staff really enjoyed the pizza today.” These are people who worked for or near Epstein talking about real food.
But What About Rare Dogs?
Yes, some emails sound weird. “Let’s go get pizza and grape soda again.” That one, taken out of context and screenshotted, looks weird. Tucker Carlson chimed in on an exchange between Epstein and his urologist, Harry Fisch, when they were discussing erectile dysfunction medication and Fisch was talking about pizza and grape soda. Carlson’s argument: health-conscious billionaires don’t eat pizza and grape soda, so it must be code.
This is the concept of conspiracy: take something that sounds strange, eliminate all possible innocent explanations, and present the wrong reading as the only one left standing. But people talk about weird shorthands all the time. The jokes are inside. People who are very health conscious also sometimes eat pizza. The fact that an email sounds funny to you when you read it out of context years later is not proof of a secret code for sleeping with children.
Here’s what would be proof: if investigators or prosecutors had marked these terms as coded language in any lawsuit, plea agreement, or court filing related to Epstein’s actual crimes. They didn’t. Prosecutors who spent years building the case against Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell did not cite the pizza references as evidence of anything. But before you go wrong: they didn’t do it because they didn’t need to. The charges were as clear as day.
The Real Problem with the Pizzagate Revival
The reason this is important isn’t because the facts of Pizzagate will reveal the secret message in these emails. The main reason is that this very type of pattern search draws public attention to the content of these documents, which is alarming enough without decoding.
Consider one email series that tells you everything you need to know. On August 26, 2017, a woman named Ann Rodriquez, staff at Great St. James Island, Epstein’s private island in the US Virgin Islands, writes about preparing meals for the “girls.”
Epstein does not use a code name! There is no metaphor for food. You just say you’re serving food when the girls come! Epstein simply refers to the “girls” (not women) who arrive on his island without bothering to hide it at all.
This is the point. Jeffrey Epstein didn’t need a secret language. He had a private island, private jets, and a network of people who did what he asked without asking. The horror of these documents is not hidden behind pizza metaphors. It’s right there at the top, in plain text, for anyone willing to read it instead of using a keyword search..
