A Slice of Heaven: How Pizza and Italian food revolutionized the American food chain.
Italian food wasn’t always considered as the “expensive” and “exotic” food that it is portrayed as today, it was once considered as an inexpensive peasant food some of the foods like homemade made casalinga (home-style) by southern Italian immigrant women in their kitchens. Adverse economic conditions had forced four million southern Italians to come to America by 1900. Descendants of all the seminal American pizza makers indicated their ancestors learned to make pizza by watching relatives make it at home, often Italian immigrants were considered peasants-workers and belonged to lower class groups in the society this is the prime reason as to why their food was also considered inexpensive just like their societal status , but eventually overtime and over the early 1900s Italian food soon saw a trend and eventually overtime it saw a rapid increase in the overall value and exoticness of the food and has now become a large part of the American global food chain with a massive 56 percent of the global American food being “pizza” with the rise of massive international food chains like “pizza hut” , “Dominoes” , “Papa Johns” and so on – this major rise led to transformation and fusion of the so called traditional “peasant food” to that of the “exotic American food” it is known as today.
The history and origin of Italian food (pizza) first started in 1905, Gennaro Lombardi applied to the New York City government for the first license to make and sell pizza in this country, at his grocery store on Spring Street in what was then a thriving Italian-American neighborhood. In 1912, Joe's Tomato Pies opened in Trenton, New Jersey. Twelve years later, Anthony (Totonno) Pero left Lombardi's to open Totonno's in Coney Island. A year later, in 1925, Frank Pepe opened his eponymous pizzeriain New Haven, Connecticut. In 1929, John Sasso left Lombardi's to open John's Pizza in Greenwich Village. The thirties saw pizza spread to Boston (Santarpio's in 1933) and San Francisco with the opening of Tommaso's (1934), followed shortly thereafter w...
