Friday Fun Facts About Pizza

Pizza. In our house it’s one of the seven basic food groups the USDA recommends for a healthy diet and lifestyle. Well maybe not every ingredient in my pizza is 100% healthy but it sure hits the spot on a Saturday night when no one feels like cooking.

The Origin Of Pizza

Mentions of Pizza date all the way back to the 900’s but many historians think the modern pizza we enjoy today was invented and refined in Naples, Italy and spread around the world from there.

Our traditional pizza is oven-baked, flat, commonly round and topped with tomato sauce, Mozzarella cheese and various topping that can vary greatly around the world. Here are a few fun pizza facts you can recite to friends and neighbors.

Fun Facts About Pizza

If you owned your own pizzeria you would be using about 55 pizza boxes each week.
Americans consume about 251 million pounds of pepperoni each year.
If you are dining on pizza in Japan expect to have squid and Mayo Jaga (a combo of mayonnaise, potato and bacon) as toppings. Not sure about the squid.
The number one single unit pizzeria in the Moose’s Tooth Pub in Anchorage, AK that has annual pizza sales of $6 million bucks. That’s a lot of pizza.
Your local pizzeria will go through about $4 billion worth of cheese annually.
Ninety-four percent of Americans eat pizza regularly and 36 percent want pepperoni as one of the toppings. Each American eats about 46 slices per year. Saturday night is the top pizza night.
The top five pizza days are: Super Bowl Sunday, New Years Eve, Halloween, Thanksgiving Eve, and New Years Day.
Pizza owners rake in 10 percent of all food service sales. They are 17 percent of all restaurants.
Minimum wage? On Super Bowl Sundays pizza delivery drivers can expect tips in the $20 or higher range. Drivers say women are better tippers.
Pizza delivery drivers will add about 4 million miles to their cars on Super Bowl Sunday.
The closer the score in the Super Bowl the more pizza fans consume.
Fast eaters? Americans will eat about 350 slices of pizza per second each day. That’s about 100 acres of pizza a day.
It’s not all pepperoni. Popular gourmet pizza toppings are chicken, oysters, crayfish, dandelions, sprouts, eggplant, Cajun shrimp, artichoke hearts, and tuna.
America is home to over 61,000 pizzerias.
October is National Pizza Month.
World wide over 500 billion pizzas are sold each year.
Kids ages 3 to 11 prefer pizza to all other food groups for lunch and dinner.
Italian Food is the most popular Ethnic food sold in the US.
The largest pizza ever made was 122 ft. 8 in. in diameter. The pizza needed 9,920 lbs. of flour, 198 lbs. of salt, 3968 lbs. of cheese, and 1,984 lbs. of tomato puree.
Domino’s in the world leader in pizza delivery.
When it comes to crust, less is more. Sixty-one percent of the population prefer regular thin crust, on 14 percent like deep-dish while 11 percent are OK with extra thin crust.
Americans are carnivores. Sixty-two percent of us prefer meat toppings and only 38% go for the veggies. Women are twice as likely to go for the veggies.
No news is good news. Pizza is most ordered during the weather forecast.
You can’t make this stuff up. Eating pizza once a week can reduce the risk of esophageal cancer. Now I feel better.
According to 36 percent of the population pizza is the perfect breakfast.
There are some pizza makers that can make 14 pizzas in 2 minutes and 35 seconds.
Delivered Hot? The longest known pizza delivery was from Cape Town, South Africa to Sydney, Australia.
Most expensive pizza created was made by the restaurateur Domenico Crolla who created a $2,745.00 priced Valentine pizza which included toppings such as sun blush-tomato sauce, Scottish smoked salmon, medallions of venison, edible gold, lobster marinated in the finest cognac and champagne-soaked caviar
What has been called "the world's most extravagant pizza" is available at New York's Nino's Bellissima restaurant. Topped with six varieties of caviar, chives, fresh lobster and creme fraiche, this 12-inch pie, called the "Luxury Pizza," retails at $1,000.00 (or $125.00 a slice). Cut that in eight slices rather than twelve OK?

Some Final Thoughts

I will admit that we do eat some pizza regularly at our house. Not sure we are in the national average but probably pretty close to it. Usually we would order pizza on Saturdays but now that we’re both retired we might up our consumption or make another night our pizza night.

Pizza and weight loss seldom go hand in hand and that’s one of my New Years Resolution is to drop some weight. Not sure peperoni, sausage and mushroom’s are on my OK to eat list so I guess I’ll have to give up the sprouts, broccoli, and turnips to balance the diet. What are your favorite pizza toppings?