Yahoo Finance Why celebrate pizza? Google Doodle shares the cultural heritage of pizza around the world
You may have sliced a few pizzas on Monday's Google Doodle, which features versions of the culinary favorite from all over the world.
Google's interactive Doodle allows you to slice pizza using your cursor, with certain rules about the number of slices you get and the toppings that need to go on each slice. The pizzas represent cultures from all over the world, including Italy, Argentina, Canada, Hungary, Japan, Thailand, India and Brazil.
Why are we celebrating pizza on Dec. 6? On the same day in 2017, the culinary art of Neapolitan “Pizzaiuolo” was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
In other words, pizza became 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 pertaining to the production and consumption of couscous."
Pizza is one of the most popular dishes in the world, and every culture has a different way of making it.
The pizza types 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 off of 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 pizza is not your thing, you can try Hawaiian pizza, topped with savory ham and sweet pineapple, or the paneer tikka pizza, covered with cottage cheese (paneer) and garam masala spices.
An estimated five billion pizzas (350 slices per second in the U.S. alone) are consumed internationally 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 southwestern Italian city of Naples is widely credited as the creating the modern pizza in the late 1700s, Google said in a blog post.
The origins of margherita pizza go back centuries as well.
According to History.com, King Umberto I and Queen Margherita went on a trip to Naples in 1889. On the journey, they tried pizza, a food typically consumed by commoners, and Queen Margherita's avid endorsement of a pizza topped with cheese, tomatoes and basil led to the name for the modern margherita pizza.
Michelle Shen is a Money & Tech Digital Reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach her @michelle_shen10 on Twitter.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: History of pizza: Google Doodle celebrates pizza from around the world
