When: February 9
National Pizza Day on February 9 celebrates the dish Americans eat more of than any other — with 3 billion pizzas sold in the U.S. annually, it's the undisputed national food.
Pizza was invented for people who couldn't afford real food. It became the most consumed food on earth.
Pizza was invented for people who couldn't afford real food. In late 18th-century Naples, street vendors sold flatbread topped with tomato to the lazzaroni — the Neapolitan working poor — from tin stoves carried on their heads. It was cheap, fast, portable, and eaten standing up. Wealthy Neapolitans considered it beneath them and avoided the neighborhoods where it was sold. The dish was functional poverty food, and nobody important was paying attention. The tomato itself was still controversial. Europeans had believed for two centuries that New World tomatoes were poisonous — a reasonable fear given their membership in the nightshade family, though incorrect. Most of Europe grew them as ornamental plants. Naples adopted them into the food supply earlier than the rest of Europe, which is why pizza with tomato sauce is specifically Neapolitan and not, say, Roman or Florentine. Geography determined flavor. The royal moment came in 1889, when King Umberto I and Queen Margherita visited...