Have a Slice on National Pizza Day!

The time has come to wrap yourself in the warm, gooey embrace of cheese, settle into a heavenly array of toppings, and chomp down on some comforting crust. It’s National Pizza Day. Celebrated on February 9th each and every year – National Pizza Day is a day that celebrates this oven baked flat bread food that is covered in sauce and cheese… and your toppings of choice, of course.

While no one knows when National Pizza Day was created – what we do know is when pizza itself was created. The original pizza was a dish created by the Romans out of placenta bread that was covered in various layers of herbs, sauce and cheese.

However, while those early dishes were technically pizzas, what people would recognize as the modern pizza wouldn’t become invented until around the 18th century. This is when some of the citizens of Naples, Italy began to create flat bread dishes covered in garlic, basil, cheese and eventually tomatoes.

During the nineteenth century, Italian immigrants began to bring this dish home to the United States. However, it really wouldn’t become popular until the service men returning from World War II returned home after developing a taste for it in Italy. This is when the pizza market in the U.S exploded and made pizza one of the most popular foods in America.

Just how popular is pizza in the United States, you ask? Well, all you have to do is look at these numbers to see how popular pizza is in this country. Every year, four billion (that’s right, billion with a “B”) pizzas are sold in the U.S. The majority of these are from restaurants, pizza chains and pizzerias, but about one billion of those are grocery bought frozen pizzas. For every man, woman and child in the U.S., over 23 pounds of pizza is consumed. That’s a LOT of slices.