Where did pizza originate from, and how did it make its way to our school lunches??? Well, the word pizza actually originates from Greece, and the name is a more evolved form of pita. Eventually, it made its way into Naples, Italy, where it was used as a way to pay rent. It consisted of bread smothered with pork fat and olive oil and topped with cheese for a while. It wasn’t until the mid-1700s that fresh tomatoes were introduced to pizza. The Italian delicacy went mainstream when the king and queen of Italy came to Naples for an Italian original, so several variants of pizza were served to them. But the most notable one that stood out was a pizza made with bread, mozzarella cheese, and basil sauce. For its taste, but mainly for the way it resembled the Italian flag, making it the Margherita pizza. After the royal endorsement, Naples, the once small, unnoticeable little area, became a very popular location for the original pizza, eventually making its way to New York, where the Ny style was made.
Now for how school lunch works. In 1946, the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) was a meal program that made efforts to bring cheap and nutritionally balanced meals to nonprofit schools around the country. It was established under the National School Lunch Act. That was signed by President Harry Truman. In efforts to make better diets for students, the Congress passed the Hunger Free Kids Act in 2010 to ensure that every child in America had the nutrition to grow into healthy adults and lower the obesity epidemic. It consists of what we have today with fruit, vegetables, whole grains, etc. Now pizza, the slice of grease, bread, tomato sauce, and cheese shouldn’t be considered exactly healthy, right? Well, the Congress again deemed pizza a vegetable by the serving size of the tomato; it wasn’t the whole pizza itself but the sauce that made it a vegetable, almost only requiring two table spoons of the sauce. That’s how pizza is still allowed in our school lunches.
Recourses:
The History of Pizza | CultureReady
Lunch_pizza-https://www.fns.usda.gov/nslp#:~:text=The%20program%20was%20established%20under,President%20Harry%20Truman%20in%201946 https://www.fns.usda.gov/pressrelease/002312 https://pizzainformer.com/2021/07/18/is-pizza-a-vegetable-heres-the-real-deal/
Image: https://ooni.com/blogs/recipes/margherita-pizza