Pizza Hut abruptly shutters 15 restaurants - with 129 more at risk - after huge bust-up with major franchisee

Daily Mail UK ^ | June 17, 2024 | Daniel Jones

[gnarledmaw]

No, it has nothing to do with Italian immigrants at all.

“Like momma made in the old country” is American made too.

The first that we know of existed long before Italy did and was more “pizza”, flat bread cooked with whatever scrounged up bits on top, than what it was for most of its existence in Italy.

Pizza in Italy varied from an un-topped perfumed loaf to a stale slice of several day old round loaf with some bits burned to the top so that it would stay safe enough over the course of several days to sell from a spot in the street to the poor.

The thing that Americans developed that we call pizza is actually closer to an amalgamation of several other Italian dishes with other names, not pizza at all even in Italy.

The idea of what pizza could be was brought back after WWI by vets and became a way of selling cheap food to the faster paced culture of NY.

Americans brought the idea of the American invention of pizza with them at the start of WWII and spread it around the world. Despite being just a few miles away from each other and travelers going from port to port it didnt spread around even Europe before then. It wasnt worth eating intentionally, other cultures developed their own way of feeding the urban poor.

Everything from the NY wide slice to the Chicago deep dish and all of the regional variations, no matter how disgusting, are every bit as authentically Italian as the others because the food we know now is entirely American. Even the very recently created “good pizzas” in Italy are a reflection of American tourism dollars (again, real Italians know that the thing fake American Italians want isnt “pizza”).

All the rest is marketing fabrication, the encouragement of retroactive identity nonsense, or movie lore just like the “authenticity” of spaghetti and meat sauce.

I too have seen some of the more recent damage control to the narrative that shows up on the internet but it really isnt any different than those that insist that “We was kangs” until someone believes it.

Poor immigrants from all over the world tend to make up stories to give themselves a history. Present day Americans are almost all the decendents of poor people and there was and is a lot of historical fabrication going on. The fact that we presently have the money to make the rest of the world pretend that its true doesnt make it real.

The Chinese would be surprised to know that they eat chop suey. The Japanese dont know that they are “supposed to” spoil their food with mayo or hot sauce. The people of India are not eating pails of various “Indian” foods either as most of those recipes are Bangladeshi immigrant marketing inventions designed for the English palate.

“Pizza” as it is presently known worldwide, is an Italian word intentionally misplaced on an American recreation of a pre-Babylonian food as a marketing ploy. If a Russian wants to melt some cheese on a buckwheat tabani or a Norwegian can get someone to take a wad of lefse with ketchup on it then as long as they claim Americans eat it and most importantly that they made a profit, its “pizza”.