Happy Pizza Day to all the foodies!
As we celebrate National Pizza Day today, here are some really interesting facts about pizza:
🍕 The first time the word “pizza” was documented was around 997 AD in Gaeta, Italy.
🍕 The first pizza was invented in Naples in the early 1500s.
🍕 The first documented pizzeria in the world was opened in Port’Alba in Naples, Italy during the late 1800s.
🍕 Pizzas were originally square-shaped.
🍕 According to the legends, America’s first pizzeria was Lombardi’s, which was originally a grocery store that started selling pizzas in 1905 much before it got popular in the 1940s.
🍕 Pizza was not popular in the United States until World War II. After stationed soldiers in Italy grew a liking for pizza during WWII, they brought the idea back to the US, and afterward, it became famous in America too.
🍕 In 2013, NASA funded a prototype 3D printer that could create food for astronauts on long-duration space missions.
🍕 The most expensive pizza in the whole world costs $12,000 and was created by Renato Viola in Salerno, Italy. Its dough is made from organic Arabian flour, and some of its ingredients include three rare types of caviar, lobster from Norway, seven types of cheese, and grains of pink Australian sea salt from the Murray River.
🍕 The world record for the largest pizza is 122 feet, 8 inches in diameter.
🍕 One 18-inch pizza gives you more pizza than two 12-inch pizzas.
🍕 According to a study conducted by the USDA, men love pizza and one in six males aged 2 to 39 eat pizza for breakfast, lunch, or dinner on any given day!
🍕 Each slice of pizza contains about 220-370 kilocalories, according to dietitians.
🍕 Saturday nights are pizza nights. Uber Eats found that a large number of Americans eat pizza for dinner on Saturday nights.
🍕 One of the interesting facts about the pizza is Pepperoni variant of the pizza is the most popular one as it consists of 36% of total pie orders.
🍕 In the USA over 3 billion pizzas are sold every year. Apart from this, another billion frozen pizzas are also sold.
🍕 In the US, 17% of the total restaurants are pizzerias. There are an estimated 70,000 pizzerias across America.
🍕 30% of Americans eat pizza at least once a week.
🍕 The first pizzeria in the US was opened in 1985 in New York City named Gennaro Lombardi.
🍕 Every second, 350 slices of pizza are eaten in the US.
🍕 The average amount of pizza consumed by an American in a year is 23 pounds.
🍕 Pizza ranks as the #2 most popular fast food in America behind hamburgers (43% of Americans rank pizza as their favorite).
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Picture Credit: Pexels