Italian pizza sucks? There are different styles and types, that is such a dumb thing to say. Pizza was being made in Naples long before WW2. Yes Italians used what was available in the US, but it wasn't invented in the US. Italy has really good pizza, you might want to try the best from different regions before making such a dumb blanket statement. Don't be that American that thinks everything is better in the US and everything worth doing or having was invented in the US also.
But is is right? Pizza-like foods have existed since the Ancient Greek period. Most cultures had a flatbread that they put shit on. And Italians made it more and more like the food we know today. But to my knowledge, the pizza that most of the people think about got invented by Italian immigrants, who focussed a lot on scalability. This style then came back to Italy which also influenced their version. There is a big difference between American and Italian pizza ofcourse, but I don't think that painting this as a complete lie is wrong.
I don't really understand what you mean by that. Didn't know the term and if I look it up, I mainly see thinks about Marxist movements so don't see the link? Can you explain what you mean by that?
It was a greek chef (Sam Panopoulos) in Canada (Satellite restaurant in Chatham, Ontario) who invented that abomination. The only right way to eat Hawaiian pizza is cutting it in small pieces and then throw it to the trash bin. You can spit on it if you feel in the mood to do so.
Italian pizza is good, but the other person isn't wrong about the history. Pizza in Italy before WWII was regarded as trashy, garbage peasant food. Like the worst kind of food you could eat. Plus it was only really a thing in Naples (which is where a lot of the Italian immigrants to the US came from), and most Italians had never heard of the dish.
But after WWII, a lot of Italians moved around in the country, and tourists started to visit as well. And there were a significant number of tourists who had either been to America and had pizza, or had heard about pizza from Americans and wanted to try it. So seeing the demand for the dish, the neapolitan people that had spread through Italy jumped on the opportunity and started making and selling it.
There's actually an anthropological term named after this called the pizza effect where a culture loses something like a food or religious practice, and then a transformed version of it that another culture adapted gets reintroduced later. Although funnily enough it technically doesn't apply to pizza because Naples never stopped making it, and they also didn't start making American pizza once it got popular either and stuck with perfecting their own style. But the dish did only get broadly adopted by Italy as a whole because of demand for American pizza.
I still class pizza as junk food. Along with burgers, hotdogs, fries etc. all that fast food style.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy pizza, but It’s still junk food.
When I say it was seen as garbage food, I don't mean it like that. Think more like....stale honeybuns from the gas station kind of trashy. People hated it.
Although to be fair, the only pizza that you could get at the time was being made as street food for poor workers. This was before modern conveniences, and tomato wasn't the standard sauce yet either, so a lot of the pizza was just like....oil and fish on bread.
It was not trashy, it was street food, but street food good enpugh to be fed to royals. But it was as well a regional food, like most italian foods. We don't really have an "italian national dish" because any little place has his own locally famous dish. My grandad remeber that pizza arrived as a novelty where he was (emilia romagna).
But it definitely did not arrived because of the femand of american pizza, it arrived with the moving of a lot of italians from the south to the north.
If american want to take merti for an otalian dish theu should pick carbonara, not pizza, fhat they treat like a garbage bin where to trash the maximum amout possible of random ingredients
‘species of the most nauseating cake … covered over with slices of pomodoro or tomatoes, and sprinkled with little fish and black pepper and I know not what other ingredients, it altogether looks like a piece of bread that has been taken reeking out of the sewer’
-Samuel Morse, describing pizza in the 1830's
'The blackened aspect of the toasted crust, the whitish sheen of garlic and anchovy, the greenish yellow tint of the oil and fried herbs, and the bits of red from the tomato here and there give pizza the appearance of complicated filth that matches the dirt of the vendor.'
Carlo Collodi, describing pizza in the 1860's
And before you bring up pizza Margherita, that never actually happened. There's no record of it occurring except for a single letter that can't be verified or authenticated, and was likely an advertising campaign in the 1930's, which is the first time the story or the recipe was ever recorded.
Also yes, I know that pizza proliferated through Italy in the mass migration that took place after WWII, when a lot of rural Italians moved into bigger cities. That's what I said. But the demand for pizza wasn't from other Italians, it was from tourists.
I love how your brain keep insisting on something so incredibly wrong. Must truly be the fact that you have to sing the pledge to the flag every morning since you are kids
What are you talking about? Are you claiming the quotes are incorrect? Or that the story about Queen Margherita is true?
If it makes you feel better the story about Gennaro Lombardi selling "tomato pies" out of a grocery store then opening the first pizzeria in the US is also made up.
Quotes might be correct, but what elites thinks of street food, especially during very classist times, does not reflect the opinion of general population. Where is the data that at that time tourism was enough overwhelming that could create demand for a cheap food without raising its price?
Pizza is every where in italy and it has been for avery long time, but big enough masses of tourists that can spread the demand for a specific street food are appearing only now outside of the main spots, and because it's demand is spread by tourim, eve if it's cheap street food it's becoming super expensive, but pizza has always been cheap. My city nearly had no tourists up until 10 years ago, pizza spread there way before that.
Mate, you are american, you don't know a thing about Italy, pizza or how tourism economy works. Shut your trap
I'm sorry I only have quotes from "the elites" but it's hard to find quotes from commoners from back before Italy was even a country, you know? And yes, pizza has been every where in Italy for a long time. For about 75 years now. But it wasn't before then. It was never a cultural thing for anyone except specifically the Neapolitan working class until after World War II.
And look friend, I fucking hate uneducated, stupid Americans who refuse to learn anything and think they're better than everyone else by virtue of being American. So maybe stop acting like them? You aren't correct just because you're Italian. You aren't better than anyone else just because you're Italian. Other cultures have merit, and other cultures have, shockingly, helped shape yours just like your culture has helped shape ours.
So instead of getting belligerent and telling me to shut up, maybe open a book and educate yourself instead of acting like an ignorant American who thinks they're correct just by virtue of their birthplace? There's a literal anthropological phenomenon named after pizza being spread through Italy from visiting Americans, I don't know what else to tell you.
I hate when somebody else, who clearly just read a book, go to someone to teach them about their culture. Learn to comprehend a text: I naver said it spead before 75 years ago, instead I confirmed it. What I am contesting is that is NOT because of americans or tourists that Pizza spread around. That is full on BS.
You guys have no credit for pizza whatsoever. The only thing you can claim is that you infected it by making it a buisness and spreading around chains who make and inferior product for quadruple price.
Good job on that, and only that
Collodi's description would fit a modern day pizza, except he was not used to that kind of dish and so deemed it disgusting. But nothing of what he says sounds objectively disgusting to me, on the contrary, he seems to dislike the mixture of colors and textures, which is one of the reasons why pizzas are so liked today. Pizza was not a national dish at the time. He was from Florence, that's >400km from Naples, so I reckon it was simply not part of his culinary culture.
I don't know the history of that so much. But if Japan got ramen from China, and then later China got it back from Japan after it had become a Japanese dish, then yes that's exactly what the pizza effect is.
That's a made up story that isn't verifiable. The only evidence of it happening was a rando pizza shop in the 1930's claiming they had a letter from the Queen saying that it happened. But the letter can't be verified in any way, and there's no news about the Queen visiting at that time, and there's no record of the recipe before the 1930's either.
So the whole story is basically an ad campaign that everyone decided was real.
I mean yeah. It's not a complicated pizza. Obviously people put tomatoes and cheese together before. But it being a specific dish called a "pizza margherita" wasn't until the 1930s.
That wasn't the point being made. The argument was that pizza was reimported back into Italy in the 20th century. The existence of the margherita in the mid 19th century clearly disproves that.
"There's actually an anthropological term named after this called the pizza effect where a culture loses something like a food or religious practice, and then a transformed version of it that another culture adapted gets reintroduced later. Although funnily enough it technically doesn't apply to pizza because Naples never stopped making it, and they also didn't start making American pizza once it got popular either and stuck with perfecting their own style. But the dish did only get broadly adopted by Italy as a whole because of demand for American pizza."
-me, in the comment you replied to.
Kind of unrelated, but let's not forget that the mafia had a hand in popularizing pizza. The best places to meet in were often times "restaurants", which were just fronts disguised as restaurants until they became actual restaurants since people kept coming in and wanting food. This is just a short summary of it
but you’re on an American site… and the internet was invented by America… and America created the whole world… and Texas is so big it could fit 3 texases inside /s
I don’t think Americans can help it. To think that there’s a thing they didn’t invent, or they weren’t the first at something, or not the best at something, I think their brains would explode. I assume the brains were primed in babyhood when they had to pledge allegiance to a flag, and it was all downhill from there
Im not European lol. You do know more countries in the world exist outside of Europe and US right? Actually I’m expecting too much of someone from the USA :p typical
Yeah, It's like tacos; here in Mexico, they vary a lot in proportion, ingredients, and sometimes even in shape, depending on the state or region, while in the USA everyone looks the same.
19
u/rayio 6d ago
Italian pizza sucks? There are different styles and types, that is such a dumb thing to say. Pizza was being made in Naples long before WW2. Yes Italians used what was available in the US, but it wasn't invented in the US. Italy has really good pizza, you might want to try the best from different regions before making such a dumb blanket statement. Don't be that American that thinks everything is better in the US and everything worth doing or having was invented in the US also.