Only pizza stands alone. Pizza, a Johnny-come-lately compared with such long-standing national favorites as the hamburger and hot dog, has secured a special place on the American table. Everybody likes pizza. Even those who claim to be immune to its charms must deign to have the occasional slice; a staggering 93 percent of Americans eat pizza at least once a month. According to one study, each man, woman, and child consumes an average of 23 pounds of pie every year.
Pizza has become both an American national habit and a world food. It is proliferating here in Mexico. Domino's made in-roads with its rapid delivery (give a Mexican kid a 125cc motor scooter and he becomes as happy as the American kid with a Camaro). Pizza Hut appeared more recently. They join a million tiny places that make pizza. Here in Chetumal (even in our little village of Bacalar), it is one of the most popular foods after the Mexican staples. My favorite place in Chetumal is Sergio's Pizza, which is neither a pizza restaurant nor Italian. It is one of the best restaurants around. It even has glass windows, air conditioning, and tablecloths that are regularly changed. It serves Mexican dishes, some attempts at "international," and American-style steaks. And pizzas. They are Mexican pizzas — very heavy on the cheese, without tomato sauce, and with all manner of possible toppings. There is even a salsa of onion, habanero peppers, and garlic to spread on it.
Back home, pizza was not always one of the basic food groups. In the 1940’s, food writers and Italian restaurants were still trying to fight the American-imagined pizza pie as huge apple pie crusts stuffed with cheese, tomatoes, and strange spices and herbs. By the 1950’s, the pizza had become a companion of the hamburger and the hot dog (German immigrant foods?).
In a 1953 story, The Times reported about:
…what is perhaps inevitable — a packaged pizza mix. The highly seasoned pizza with its tough crust and tomato topping is such a gastronomical craze that the open pie threatens the pre-eminence of the hot dog and hamburger.
Ms. Miller goes on to fill in the history of pizza.
Modern pizza originated in Italy, although the style favored by Americans is more a friend than a relative of the traditional Neapolitan pie. Residents of Naples took the idea of using bread as a blank slate for relishes from the Greeks, whose bakers had been dressing their wares with oils, herbs, and cheese since the time of Plato. The Romans refined the recipe, developing a delicacy known as placenta, a sheet of fine flour topped with cheese and honey and flavored with bay leaves. Neapolitans earned the right to claim pizza as their own by inserting a tomato into the equation. Europeans had long shied away from the New World fruit, fearing it was plump with poison. But the intrepid citizens of Naples discovered the tomato was not only harmless but delicious, particularly when paired with pizza.
Article comments
1 - Heloise
Illegal Avenue--coming soon to a theatre near you.
I wrote about how illegals are creating an obesity crisis here with their low wages and more junk food available in this country. In fact school districts are replacing black women, single with children, with illegals in the cafeteria who speak NO English. They are impacting the food thing here.
But not so fast with Heloise because she knows how fattening their foods are plus she's a vegetarian so I am not tempted by much of their fare. I do not eat Mexican food or texmessmex food because it is just not my culture.
I am part Italian and most of my food choices reflect that. Look at their kids, they're fat. The grocery stores in my area, mostly Mexican, are crammed with women and two shopping carts full of FOOD paid with by food stamp cards.
The kids are as fat as black kids and there is no end in sight.
Heloise
2 - Bliffle
Ethnic food, like everything else ethnic, is detestable and noone should eat it.
Instead of just slavishly eating the same food your mother made, one should investigate what foods one needs, and the side effect of foods and then design onesown diet. As I do (more people should be like me!)
Most ethnic foods are nothing more than cheap food-components which are combined into fatty globs which is easily packaged and easily sold to masses of ignorant people.
3 - Howard Dratch
Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report showing that recent immigrants reported significantly better physical and mental health (such as lower rates of obesity and high blood pressure) than their U.S.-born counterparts, despite having limited access to health care and little or no health insurance. The study found that people from other countries (African-American, Asian and Hispanic) who move to the United States become progressively less healthy the longer they stay in the country. Those who were U.S. residents for five years or more were 54 percent more likely to have high blood pressure and 25 percent more likely to have cardiovascular diseases, for example, than those who lived here less than five years.I must disagree with these comments. "Illegals" may or may not be fat. America is suffering its own obesity epidemic which comes as much or more from fast foods, junk foods and convenience foods than from foreign foods. Unless the chains of McDonalds, Pizza Huts, Kentucky Fried and the rest are really owned by "illegals".
Bliffle wrote, "Ethnic food, like everything else ethnic, is detestable and noone should eat it." Which ethnic foods: slabs of roast beef (English), watercress soup (Chinese), Tandoori chicken (India), stuffed grape leaves (Greece), vichyssoise (French), Fish in Veracruzana sauce (Mexican), Miso soup (Japan)?
Obviously different ethnic groups have "... cheap food-components which are combined into fatty globs..." There are hot dogs covered with bacon, Quarter-pounders with cheese, deep-fried ham and cheese sandwiches, brie baked in a pastry shell, Cuban sandwiches with everything on them... I have made myself hungry with the first group and would be dead if I ate from group B.
In Newsweek on line today Dr. Dean Ornish wrote on "Globalizing Health",