If someone asked you what your top 10 favorite foods were, there's a good chance that pizza would be on that list, but how far does America's delicious obsession go?
According to a poll created by the restaurant chain CiCi's Pizza and reported in the New York Daily News, the average American will eat at least 6,000 slices during the course of a lifetime. CiCi’s survey of 1,000 people also found that one-third of those who eat pizza do so at least once a week, and one in 10 of us eats as many as three slices as often as three times a week. And while 85 percent say they eat pizza mostly because they enjoy the way it tastes (thin crust or deep dish, one-third of us don’t care which), 47 percent of us admit that convenience is a pretty big factor as well.
According to the National Restaurant Association, Italian food ranks as the most popular ethnic food in America. So it's no wonder that Americans eat approximately 100 acres of pizza each day, or 350 slices per second, and with over 60,000 pizzerias in the united states alone, pizza has created a 30 billion dollar industry.
According to Carol Helstosky, author of "Pizza: A Global History" and associate professor of history at the University of Denver. The beginning of pizza's popularity in the world can be traced back to Naples, a Greek settlement founded around 600 B.C., and in the 1700s and early 1800s was a thriving waterfront city. Naples, at this time, was known for its masses of poor working class known as the lazzaroni; many of whom slept outside or one bedroom houses.
Unlike the wealthy people of Naples, the poor needed cheap food that could be eaten quickly. Pizza—flatbreads with various toppings, devoured for any meal and sold by street vendors or informal restaurants—met this need. “Judgmental Italian authors often called their eating habits ‘disgusting,’” Helstosky noted. These early pizzas consumed by Naples’ poor featured the tasty garnishes beloved today, such as tomatoes, cheese, oil, anchovies and garlic.
Around 10 years after the unification of Italy, King Umberto I and Queen Margherita visited Naples. The legend says that the two grew tired of their diet of French cuisine and wanted to try different pizzas from one of the city's prominent restaurants. It's said that the queen loved one specific recipe, calling for soft white cheese, red tomatoes and green basil, so much that it was to be named after her creating the Margherita pizza. The Queen's public approval of the dish is said to have been the reason pizza became such a popular dish amongst all people in Italy and not just the working class.
Soon Naples immigrants were coming to the United States, bringing their delicious dishes with them. It didn't take long for pizza to become popular in many prominent cities, such as: Boston, Chicago, New York, New Haven and many other places.
The first documented American pizzeria was G. Lombardi's in 1905, and although the location of the restaurant isn't the same as it once was over 100 years ago, their delicious and traditional pizzas remain the same.
