The history of pizza, and how travel shapes how and what we eat

Pizza is one of those food items that everyone has definitely seen or heard about at some point, even if we may have never tasted it before. This popularity is a testament, in many ways, to the journeys pizza has made around the world, and how that movement exposed the dish, both to innovation and also to global exposure and later dominance. Pizza seems to have rather obscure origins, as the idea of eating a baked bread dish with vegetable toppings has been common in the Middle East and ancient Greece and Rome for centuries; there were also similar recorded practices in parts of Asia, such as India and China.

However, the highly recognizable dish topped with tomato sauce and cheese was reportedly invented at the tail end of the nineteenth century in Naples, Italy, by a man called Rafaelle Esposito. Prior to this, pizza had developed as a street food amongst the working classes of Naples, who were largely poor people and immigrants. At the time, French cooking was the popular option for wealthy Neapolitans, but a chance tourism visit to the city by the then King and Queen gave Esposito a chance to showcase his homegrown dish in a big way. The royal couple responded favorably to the dish, and it took off around the country afterwards due to word of mouth.

Surprisingly, pizza did not become the globally recognized dish it is today until the post-WWII period, when emigrant Italians in cities like New York and London began to make and sell pizzas to their new neighbours. Soldiers who had been stationed at Italy had already acquired a taste for pizza, so it wasn’t long before the dish was quite popular within the US as well. The US cultural industry, headed by Hollywood, then helped to cement pizza’s position as a globally iconic dish, exporting the taste for it to a global audience using media channels like music and films.

Today, pizza is one of the most regularly consumed food products in the world, and this success can be traced by following the paths of travel that have been associated with it. From the poor immigrants of Napoli trying to subsist on a cheap dish, to the visiting monarchs of the Italy taking a chance on an unfamiliar local cuisine, to the New York emigres capitalising on the nostalgia of past military service to popularise their product, travel and the movement of people have been instrumental to pizza’s evolution from a lowly street food to the best known dish on the planet.