Pizza is one of the foods for which we can hardly name a specific origin. Putting stuff on flat bread as a meal goes back as far as ancient Rome. The word "pizza" appeared just before 1000 AD, in the area between Naples and Rome.

The word itself is probably related to pita (bread), so let's start with the crust. In ancient times, all bread was basically flat. In the middle ages, people started to put things on the bread and then eating it, kind of like what we today might call an open face sandwich. It wasn't really a new way of eating--the bread was a sort of placemat, to help keep the table clean during meals. Only the rich could afford plates, so a flat piece of hard barley bread on the table was used instead for people who were too poor to buy plates. Some bread was specially baked for that purpose. After the meal, sometimes the bread was eaten, and sometimes given to the dogs.

There are traditional pizza-like dishes in Provence where bread is topped with onion, tomato, anchovies and olives. In the Middle East, lahma bi ajeen is a pizza base with minced onions, meat and flavorings.

American pizza, which can now found throughout the world, was invented in America in the 1950s. Italian immigrants brought pizza to the United States in the early 1900s. However, it was the 1950s when pizza caught on outside the Italian-American community, and quickly spread throughout the U.S., and then the world.

We will never know the genius that first put together the bread, tomato sauce, and cheese. But that's how pizza came to be.

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