Happy National Pizza Day

On February 9th, let's commemorate National Pizza Day! Before the WW2 era, it was rare to find pizza outside of Italy and an Italian immigrant hubbub, but look at it now! Pizza is undoubtedly the star of any dinner it appears at. Long live pizza!

The pizza, with its origins traceable to ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, has become most associated with the Campania region of southwestern Italy, mainly the city of Naples. By the 1700s and early 1800s, the port city was building a reputation of poverty and overcrowding, and its people needed a fast, inexpensive way of eating. This is where the pizza came in, composed of flatbread topped with ingredients such as tomatoes, cheese, oil, anchovies, and garlic. Although there were a few well-off Italian critics of the Naples diet, it quickly became a favorite in the area.

In 1861, Italy was finally unified and in 1889 King Umberto I and Queen Margherita visited Naples. Legend holds that have become tired of French food, they asked for a selection of pizzas from Pizzeria Brandi, founded back in 1760. The queen was especially fond of pizza mozzarella, topped with white cheese, red tomatoes, and green basil - similar to the colors of the Italian flag. Since then, this is the topping combination remembered as the Margherita pizza.

Despite the Queen's fondness for pizza, the dish hardly made it beyond the boundaries of Naples until the 1940s. Immigrants from Naples who traveled to the United States for factory jobs were replicating their flatbreads in cities such as New York. As a result, this unintentionally initiated the current cuisine. Soon, the unique tastes and scents of pizza attracted the attention of people who were not from Naples or Italy.

FULL RANKING OF AMERICA’S FAVORITE PIZZA BRANDS
#1: Pizza Hut (31%)
#2: Papa John’s (22%)
#3: Domino’s (17%)
#4: Papa Murphy’s (10%)
#5: Little Caesar’s (8%)
#6: Sbarro (3%)
#7: Cici’s Pizza (2.8%)
#8: California Pizza Kitchen (2.8%)
#9: Round Table (2.6%)
#10: Chuck E. Cheese’s (1%)

Approximately 350 slices of pizza are sold in the U.S. each second, with about 120 of those slices heading straight to the National Today offices. Additionally, 17% of all American restaurants are pizzerias and 10% of those are situated in New York City. Over and above that, the U.S. consumes a total of 251.7 million pounds of pepperoni annually, a large portion of which goes on pizzas.