Pizza Nostra

Water, flour, olive oil, cheese, later tomatoes, and whatever leftovers are available… This is the quintessential food of the poor—simple, eaten straight from the dish, adaptable to all sauces, and even portable. It is the sustenance for simple folks from a small corner of the Mediterranean. And yet, in just a century, pizza has become humanity's most universal dish. North Korea, the most closed-off country in the world, seeks to acquire it. In the United States, recent studies show that pizza has definitively dethroned the hamburger as the favorite dish of Americans (who also believe they invented it). Historians argue over its origins. Round, square, fresh, frozen, gulped down in a hurry, savored with family by the Nile or on the beaches of Copacabana—Neapolitan, Norwegian, or Hawaiian—pizza oscillates between purity and degeneration, serving as an absolute paradigm of Italian identity and a scapegoat of globalized consumption.