All About Food:

For those of you who don’t keep track of these important milestones, January was National Pizza Month and Feb. 9 is International Pizza Day. So, put these on your calendar for next year before you forget again. Americans eat an average of 18 acres of pizza every day and spend about $32 billion a year indulging this pleasure. The average American consumes 23 pounds of pizza per year. Pepperoni and cheese is the most popular combination and pizza’s second only to the hamburger as this continent’s favorite food.

Although most of us think of pizza as Italian, its origins are most likely in Greece. As far as 8000 B.C.E., men knew how to mix flour with water into dough, season it with herbs and heat it on a hot stone to create a flat bread. The earliest cheese making began about 5500 B.C. but tomatoes didn’t appear on the scene until the Conquistadors brought them to Europe from the New World.

Food historians credit the Greeks with the idea of using a flat bread as a plate for an assortment of toppings. It might be called the first true convenience food. With the constant traffic between the ancient worlds of Greece and Rome, these flatbreads made their way to what is now known as Italy, where they became known as pizza. The word was probably derived from the Latin word “pinsa,” which means “flatbread.”

Pizza became a popular street food, not topped with anything, just eaten au natural. Typically young boys would walk around the city with small tin stoves on their heads, hawking their wares. The next step was brushing them with olive oil and fresh herbs and occasionally some cheese was added. But the big leap that turned into what we know as pizza was the introduction of the tomato in the 16th century.

At first thought to be poisonous, it was used as a decorative houseplant. Then during a famine in the 18th century, poor people who were starving took a chance and ate it. Thus, a new delicious foodstuff was found. Also, cheese known as mozzarella, made from the milk of the water buffalo who grazed on the pastures of Campania, was limited to a regional specialty due to its perishable nature.