You may have sliced up a few pizzas on Monday’s Google Doodle, which features versions of the culinary favorite from around the world.
Google’s interactive Doodle lets you slice a pizza using your cursor, with certain rules about how many slices you get and what toppings should be placed on each slice. The pizzas represent cultures from around the world, including Italy, Argentina, Canada, Hungary, Japan, Thailand, India and Brazil.
Why are we celebrating pizza on December 6th? On the same day in 2007, the culinary art of the Neapolitan “Pizzaiuolo” was inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity of UNESCO.
In other words, pizza has become a cultural touchstone of the human race. Other items on the list of intangible cultural heritage of humanity include camel racing as well as “practices relating to the production and consumption of couscous”.
Pizza is one of the most popular dishes in the world and each culture has a different way of preparing it.
Types of pizza in the interactive game include margherita, pepperoni, white, calabresa, muzzarella, Hawaiian, magyaros, teriyaki mayonnaise, tom yum, paneer tikka, and dessert.
Tom yum pizza is based on the traditional Thai soup called tom yum, and the pizza is topped with shrimp and mushrooms with flavors like lime and lemongrass.
If seafood on the pizza isn’t your thing, you can try the Hawaiian pizza, topped with salted ham and sweet pineapple, or the paneer tikka pizza, topped with cottage cheese (paneer) and garam masala spices. .
It is estimated that five billion pizzas (350 slices per second in the United States alone) are consumed worldwide each year, Google said in a blog post.
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Although flatbread with toppings has been consumed for centuries in ancient civilizations, from Egypt to Rome, the city of Naples in southwestern Italy is widely regarded as the creator of modern pizza in the late 1700s, Google said in a blog post.
The origins of margherita pizza also go back centuries.
According to History.com, King Umberto I and Queen Margherita went on a trip to Naples in 1889. During the trip, they tried pizza, a food typically eaten by commoners, and Queen Margherita’s avid endorsement. from a pizza topped with cheese, tomatoes and basil led to the name of the modern margherita pizza.
Michelle Shen is Money & Tech digital reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach her @ michelle_shen10 on Twitter.