Pizza seems so thoroughly woven into American life that it is difficult to imagine a time when most Americans had no idea what it was. Today it fuels birthday parties, office meetings, football weekends, college students, exhausted parents, and approximately 93 percent of all discussions that begin with the words, “What should we order?”

Its conquest of the United States, however, was surprisingly recent. Modern pizza developed in Naples, crossed the Atlantic with Italian immigrants, remained largely within Italian-American communities for decades, and then exploded into the American mainstream during the twentieth century.

Along the way, pizza history acquired royal legends, disputed origin stories, regional rivalries, questionable nutritional decisions, and enough topping controversies to end otherwise healthy friendships.

Pizza Was Not Invented in 1889

If you have heard the traditional history of pizza, you probably know the year 1889. That was supposedly when Neapolitan pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito prepared a pizza for Queen Margherita of Savoy using red tomatoes, white mozzarella, and green basil—the colors of the newly unified Italian flag.

It is a wonderful story. It has royalty, patriotism, melted cheese, and a convenient date. Historians, naturally, have responded by making everything more complicated.

Pizza had been sold in Naples long before Queen Margherita showed up. By the eighteenth century, Neapolitans were eating inexpensive flatbreads topped with ingredients such as tomatoes, oil, garlic, and cheese. Antica Pizzeria Port’Alba traces its origins to a street-food stand established in 1738 and became a sit-down pizzeria during the nineteenth century.

Even more damaging to the neat 1889 origin story, descriptions of Neapolitan pizza topped with tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil appeared decades before the queen’s supposed encounter with Esposito. The royal visit may have helped popularize the name “Margherita,” but Esposito did not suddenly invent tomato-and-cheese pizza because a queen happened to be hungry.

This is one of history’s recurring problems: the truth often develops gradually over decades, while legends arrive fully assembled with a famous person standing conveniently in the middle.

Pizza Needed the Tomato—and Europeans Were Suspicious of It

Humans had been putting things on flatbread for thousands of years, but pizza as we recognize it required one crucial ingredient that ancient Romans could not possibly have used: the tomato.

Tomatoes originated in the Americas and reached Europe after Spanish exploration of the New World. Europeans did not immediately respond by saying, “Excellent. Somebody find us mozzarella.” Instead, many regarded the strange member of the nightshade family with suspicion.

The tomato eventually found a particularly receptive audience among poorer residents of Naples, where it became an inexpensive way to add flavor to bread. That development helped transform earlier flatbreads into recognizably modern pizza.

The tomato’s long struggle for respectability is a story in its own right. We have previously looked at why people once believed tomatoes were poisonous and at the surprisingly important question of whether a tomato is legally a fruit or a vegetable. Apparently, humanity could not simply eat the thing. We first had to litigate and mythologize it.

When Did Pizza Arrive in America?

Pizza crossed the Atlantic with Italian immigrants during the great waves of migration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At first, it remained primarily an Italian-American food, especially in cities with large immigrant communities such as New York, Boston, New Haven, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

Older histories frequently identify 1905 as the year pizza officially arrived in the United States. That is too late.

A December 1903 article in the New-York Tribune described something it called “pomidore pizza,” or tomato pie. The writer explained that dough was flattened, covered with tomatoes and red pepper, and baked. The article also described a “salami pizza” containing tomatoes, cheese, peppers, and sausage.

In other words, Americans were reading explanations of pizza more than a century ago because editors apparently understood that readers might encounter the word and reasonably ask, “A what?”

Was Lombardi’s Really America’s First Pizzeria?

For generations, the standard account credited Gennaro Lombardi with opening America’s first licensed pizzeria at 53½ Spring Street in New York City in 1905. Lombardi’s remains one of the most famous names in American pizza history, but research has complicated the claim that everything started there.

Pizza historian Peter Regas uncovered records indicating that pizza businesses were operating in New York before Lombardi arrived in the United States. One particularly intriguing figure was Filippo Milone, a Neapolitan immigrant who appears to have opened or operated several early pizzerias around Manhattan and Brooklyn.

A 1903 advertisement in the Italian-language newspaper Il Telegrafo specifically advertised one of Milone’s pizza businesses. Records also suggest that the Spring Street establishment later associated with Lombardi had previous operators.

That does not make Lombardi unimportant. It simply means that American pizza history, like most history worth reading, refuses to behave itself once somebody starts checking the paperwork.

World War II Helped Turn Pizza Into an American Food

Before World War II, pizza was familiar in Italian-American neighborhoods but remained relatively exotic to much of the country. The war helped change that.

Millions of American servicemen spent time overseas, and those stationed in Italy encountered pizza firsthand. When they returned home, many brought an appetite for the food with them. At roughly the same time, technological changes made pizza easier to produce outside traditional coal- and wood-fired pizzerias.

By the 1950s, pizza’s transformation from ethnic specialty to mainstream American food was well underway. National and regional chains followed. Frozen pizza entered supermarkets. Delivery eventually made it possible to summon dinner by telephone without putting on respectable clothes.

Civilization had peaked.

How Much Pizza Do Americans Actually Eat?

The internet is filled with spectacular pizza statistics. Americans supposedly eat 100 acres of pizza every day. We supposedly consume 350 slices every second. Somewhere, someone has undoubtedly calculated the amount in Olympic swimming pools.

The problem is that many of those figures have circulated for decades without a clear trail back to reliable data.

A much better measurement comes from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In a 2024 analysis of national dietary survey data collected from 2017 through March 2020, the USDA found that about 11 percent of Americans age two and older ate pizza on any given day.

That may sound modest until you remember that the country has hundreds of millions of residents. “Eleven percent on any random day” translates into a remarkable number of people simultaneously asking whether anyone wants the last slice while quietly hoping everyone says no.

The same USDA study found that more than half of the pizza consumed came from restaurants, while roughly one-quarter came from grocery stores. Pizza was eaten overwhelmingly at lunch and dinner, with dinner particularly important among adults.

Men and Women Apparently Approach Pizza Differently

The USDA even measured the number of slices eaten at a typical pizza-eating occasion. On average, males consumed four slices and females consumed three.

This information may finally explain why ordering one pizza for a group of people invariably requires a level of mathematics otherwise associated with orbital mechanics.

There Is No Single “American Pizza”

Once pizza became American, Americans immediately did what Americans traditionally do with imported foods: changed it beyond recognition and then began arguing about whose version is authentic.

New York developed its large, thin, foldable slices. New Haven became famous for coal-fired apizza. Chicago produced deep-dish pizza substantial enough to require structural engineering. Detroit gave us rectangular pies with crisp, caramelized cheese around the edges. St. Louis developed its cracker-thin crust and distinctive Provel cheese.

And then somebody put pineapple on one.

We will allow future historians to determine precisely when civilization took that particular turn.

Pizza Making Is Officially Cultural Heritage

Pizza’s importance in Naples goes far beyond dinner. In 2017, UNESCO placed the “Art of Neapolitan Pizzaiuolo” on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

The designation does not mean UNESCO declared pizza itself a World Heritage Site. Rather, it recognizes the traditional knowledge, techniques, and social practices involved in Neapolitan pizza making—the preparation of the dough, the movements of the pizzaiolo, the wood-fired oven, and the passing of those skills from one generation to another.

So, yes, somewhere in the United Nations system there is official paperwork recognizing the cultural importance of making pizza correctly. This is the sort of international cooperation we can all get behind.

Pizza Can Even Help You With Mathematics

Pizza has one final contribution to civilization: it can help you remember the formula for the volume of a cylinder.

A pizza is essentially a very tasty cylinder. If its radius is represented by z and its thickness by a, the familiar formula πr²h becomes π × z × z × a—or, as we have previously demonstrated, “pi z z a.”

This may not be what the ancient Greeks had in mind when developing geometry, but it is difficult to argue with the result.

From Naples to Nearly Everywhere

Pizza did not spring fully formed from the oven in 1889, nor did it suddenly appear in America in 1905. Its history is a much better story than that: ancient flatbreads, New World tomatoes, Neapolitan street vendors, Italian immigration, obscure newspaper references, disputed pizzeria pioneers, returning soldiers, regional experimentation, and eventually a nation in which eating pizza barely requires an occasion.

The toppings change. The crust changes. The shape changes. People continue to argue over whether it should be folded, forked, deep-dished, charred, stuffed, or subjected to pineapple.

But after several centuries of development and more than a century in the United States, pizza has achieved something few foods manage: it can be inexpensive street food, serious culinary craftsmanship, emergency dinner, party food, regional identity, and a geometry lesson all at once.

That is a lot of responsibility for a piece of dough covered in cheese.

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