Pizza! Pizza!
- Luanne
- Oct 8
- 2 min read
Happy National Pizza Month!! I know, I know, October is the official start of Spooky Season, and pizza isn't very spooky, but hey, Papa Murphy's does a super cute Jack-O-Lantern Pizza. And while Semi-Homemade Life may not have spooky pizza, we definitely have pizza, and some random pizza facts for no other reason than, well, food facts are fun.
Pizza has been around FOR-EV-ER!!! In fact, the first documented use of the word pizza was in 997 CE and continued later on in parts of Central and Southern Italy.
The precursor to pizza is believed to have been a flatbread with toppings eaten by ancient Romans. Which, honestly, is how I eat most of my homemade pizza. But by the late 18th century, it was common for the poor of the area around Naples to add tomato to their yeast-based flatbread, thus the pizza began.
While pizza was initially created to be eaten by the poor, slowly the flatbread with toppings started to be appreciated by all social classes. Initially, it was produced by bakeries and meant to be eaten while walking. In the first decades of the 19th century, this changed with the opening of the first pizzerias with tables in Naples. According to documents discovered by historian Antonio Mattozzi in the State Archive of Naples, in 1807, 54 pizzerias existed. In the second half of the 19th century, the number of pizzerias had increased to 120.
Pizza first made its appearance in the United States with the arrival of Italian immigrants in the late 19th century. One of the generally accepted early US businesses to sell pizza, Lombardi's, opened in 1897 as a grocery store, with tomato pies wrapped in paper and tied with a string sold at lunchtime to workers from the area's factories.
Before the 1940s, in the US, pizza consumption was limited mostly to Italian Americans. Following World War II, veterans returning from the Italian Campaign, who were introduced to Italy's native cuisine, proved a ready market for pizza in particular. By the 1950s, it was popular enough to be featured in an episode of I Love Lucy. Once it had become fully naturalized in the U.S., its market expanded in two different directions: through neighborhood pizzerias and through pizza chains.
Random Pizza Facts:
In 2012, the world's largest pizza was made in Los Angeles. It measured 1261.65 square meters in area.
Little Caesars started the "Pizza! Pizza!" advertisement in 1979 to promote it "two great pizzas, one low price" offer.
13% of the US population consumes pizza on any given day.
A pizza was delivered to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2001 by a resupply rocket, making it the first pizza to be eaten in space.
The most popular pizza topping in the US is pepperoni, according to Silicon Valley Pizza Week.
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