So what’s the deal with Pizza?
Pizza has been welcomed with so much craze today that most restaurants often overcharge for a simple flatbread with toppings of your choice. It has now become a symbol of status and pride because so many restaurant kitchens are dedicated solely to master the art of cooking a perfect pizza. The evolution is thought-provoking because we have pizzas made to suit the regional customs in every corner of the world. A Paneer Makhani pizza is something you would only find in India. And a pizza with boiled eggs would be something you would essentially do in other corners of the world.
But pizzas did not have such a glorious beginning; in fact, people would shy away from this fast food so much that food writers would not even mention it.
Naples: Where Pizza was born
The birthplace of Pizza is instead an inadequate Greek settlement. This place was called ‘Naples,’ a city by the bay. And as Wikipedia puts it, the natives of Naples were ‘the poorest of the lower class.’ So naturally, anything they did or invented would not have been taken very positively at a time when people considered rulers to be their Almighty. Affluent foreign visitors dubbed pizzas as ‘coming from the sewer,’ ‘disgusting,’ and ‘nauseating.’
But for the natives, life was good with Pizza. As their work was mainly labor-intensive, they needed fast food that they could eat on the go. An added advantage for them was that they could buy slices of Pizza depending on their convenience as against buying a full-fledged meal. If a workday wasn’t perfect financially, they could buy just a few slices and enjoy the same rich pizza taste. However, the Italian acceptance of Pizza came only after a Royal Queen’s approval.
Did you know?
The Margherita
The Pizza we eat today was named after Queen Margherita of Italy in 1889.
The approval of the Queen
The story goes that King Umberto I and Queen Margherita came to Naples for a visit in 1889. Fed up with the usual complicated French dishes, the Queen demanded an assortment of pizzas. Raffaele Esposito brought three types of pizzas to the table. The Queen loved the one with tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil. And hence the Pizza was named Pizza Margherita in her honor.
Later, when the inhabitants of Naples migrated to the United States in search of work, they took their pizza delicacies to places like New York and Chicago. And just because the U.S.A. loved pizzas, the rest of the countries became fans too.
What do we learn from this story?
If your startup is not doing so well, you are unemployed or worse, underpaid, or your boss doesn’t value your efforts, you are not alone. People take time to appreciate efforts and recognize true art. Just keep investing in those days, and you will be fine!
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