Global Pizza
So you thought hamburgers were the world's most popular fast food? After all, McDonald's Golden Arches span the globe. But no, there is another truly universal fast food, the ultimate fast food. It's easy to make, easy to serve, much more varied than the hamburger, can be eaten with your hands, and it's delivered to your front door or served in fancy resturants. It's been one of America's favourite foods for over 50 years. It is, of course, the pizza.
A brief history of Pizza
It's kind of silly to talk about the moment when pizza was invented. It gradually evolved over the years, but one thing's for certain - it's been around for a very long time. The idea of using pieces of flat, round bread as plates came from the Greeks. They called these plakuntos and ate them with various simple topings such as oil, garlic, onions, and herbs. The Romans enjoyed eating something similar and called it picea.
By about 1000 AD in the city of Naples, picea had become pizza and people were experimenting with more toppings: cheese, ham, anchovies, and finally the tomato, brought to Italy from Mexico and Peru in the sixteenth century. Naples became the pizza capital of the world. In 1889, King Umberto I and Queen Margherita heard about pizza and asked to try it. They invited pizza maker, Raffaele Esposito, to make the dish for them. Esposito decided to make the pizza like the Italian flag, so he used red tomatoes, white mozzarella cheese, and green basil leaves. the Queen loved it and the new piza was named Pizza Margherita in her honour.
Pizza migrated to America with the Italians at the end of the nineteenth century. The first pizzeria in the United States was opened in 1905 at 53 Spring Street, New York City, by Gennaro Lombardi. But the popularity of pizza really exploed when American soldiers returned from Italy after World War II and raved about that great Italian dish. Americans are now the greatest consumers of pizza in the world
