My hometown has seven Pizza Parlors within a five mile radius. My vacation hometown, which has approximately nine hundred people, has about 1000 pizza places-well maybe just eight, which is still too many for the amount of people in town.
I love a good pizza like the next person do not get me wrong, I just did not understand our fascination with it and I needed to do a little research.
Pizza has a history going back to the Ancient Greeks and the Romans. The Ancient Greeks covered their bread with oil, cheese, and herbs; while the Romans added honey and cheese to flat bread that was flour based and flavored with bay leaves.
Modern pizza started out as a Neapolitan Pie with tomatoes and cheese in Italy around 1889. Gennaro Lombardi sold the first “American” pizza in 1905. Yes folks, it was not Papa Gino who originally sold the first pizza in America. Fact is, Mr. Gino is just a character in the like the Energizer Bunny is much to my dismay.
Who does not like pizza? In my college years, I could eat a whole cheese pizza without even batting an eye. Later on when I started watching those terrible things called calories, eating a whole pie is not one of the best things for your body. Adding pepperoni, sausage, meatballs, and any other calorie filled item will make your eyes water with glee but unfortunately add to your waste line.
Combinations like ham and pineapple on a pizza, a personal favorite, makes creating a pizza a sweet science. It does not matter to me how unhealthy most pizzas are because of the high fat and oil content, if you can think of it you can throw it on a pizza and bon appetite.
So why do Americans have such a fascination with pizza? Why not lasagna parlors or meatloaf shops? Chain pizza parlors started in the early 1940’s in New York, Boston and Los Angeles predominantly. These chains flourished as pizza is relatively easy to make with cheap ingredients and a high profit margin. Quick, easy, and high profit - as American as it gets. Pizza restaurants out number all fast food restaurants times ten in America.
Now that I learned where pizza came from, I still wanted to know why we eat so much of it and why there is a pizza parlor on every corner. Is it the mozzarella cheese that keeps people coming back? The incredible taste of an onion and pepper pizza? Maybe it is just how easy it is to order one and either pick it up close by or get it delivered right to your door step. Maybe it is just all about the taste.
Amanda Maclay, a scientist who researched why pizza taste’s so good, wrote a paper on the specifics of how pizza because of its fat content and spices actually stimulate most of our 10,000 taste buds. I read Amanda’s piece and I did not see how this explained anything to me. French Fries have no spices and I guarantee they stimulate all of my ten thousand taste buds.
Miraculously, it dawned on me why pizza is as popular as it is. Forget the taste bud angle. Forget that it goes great with another American food staple, beer. The beer angle was seriously thought out in my head but the image of a seven year old covered in sauce and cheese begging his parents for more dismissed that thought.
I also had to eliminate the top reason being that pizza is good either hot or cold or better yet out of the box from the floor in a college dorm room two days later. Chinese food is equal to pizza here.
The real reason I believe that pizza is so popular is that it is the one food that a family can buy where all can be satisfied. Do not like onions, only add to half the pie; cannot decide between meat or veggie, add all of them. Pizza offers so much variety it satisfies everyone after the combinations are discussed in a true strategic session generally reserved for the Pentagon.
Knowing how some families cannot reach a decision on anything, it does not amaze me any more why there are so many Pizza Parlors. The more parlors there are the better the odds that a family can reach a mutual decision on which place to order from, increasing the odds for that peaceful meal. That is it right, isn’t it?
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