> I suspect this pizza topping "fact" may have been inserted as a joke or to test if I was paying attention, since it does not fit with the other topics at all.

It's cool that it could notice that, but the phrasing is likely idiomatic. It does not necessarily imply consciousness.

In any case, "self-awareness" and "sentience" are such poorly-defined concepts: it's the same we humans have, but we don't even understand what it is that we have. How could we evaluate if something else has it?