I think it's really hard to say much of anything about the influence of different cultures on food, especially anything regarding flatbreads.

Every culture has some form of flatbread. Every culture has figured out "we can put other foods in/on-top of this flatbread". They figured it out thousands of years ago. Once you have the basic mechanic figured out, do the exact inputs matter that much, especially when you consider how varied the inputs can be within a specific, arbitrary category?

There is the common, bad-highschool-history meme of "(The Earl of Sandwich/his personal cook) invented the sandwich". Or, every culture has a tradition of picking up food with bread, for thousands of years, and it's not that big of a deal. A grilled cheese sandwich is just a Western European quesadilla!

One of my favorite ways to get people to scoff at me is to call polenta "grits". Yes, yes, "different strain of corn". But honestly, there are so many other variations in polenta/grits preparations that the specific strain of corn is really a minor drop in the bucket, and mostly amounts to regional availability. I know folks who will go nutso-spendo over "shrimp on a bed of polenta" but think "shrimp and grits" is cheap-food.

Polenta was (still is?) a poor man dish in the past. People got pellagra by eating only polenta all the time (BTW just discovered English and Italian use the same word). Selling it as a fancy food is a really,really good marketing trick.

To my taste, the difference between hominy grits (aka grits) and polenta is the nixtamalization.

If grits and polenta are the same dish, why so are cucumber salad and pickle relish.

My wife is from the heartland of 'polenta' country in northern Italy, and it is absolutely "commoner food".

Yeah, I live in Northern VA. We have a lot more dollars than sense here. We also like to white-wash southern food. Here in the DC area, for how it's prepared in dishes, polenta is definitely "rich-person's grits".

You can combine polenta with something quite fancy, and that's not unheard of in Italy. But it's also something that was a staple for the poor.

Some people think that pizza was Marco Polo's best try to make some Chinese scallion pancakes upon returning to Italy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cong_you_bing#Chinese_legend_s...

Apparently the argument against this is that pizza existed in the Mediterranean, which is not compatible with the idea that pizza came from New York.

I believe Pizza/Pita like flat-bread type foods have existed in the Mediterranean since ancient Greek times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_pizza

if one is to trust the historical information quoted on wikipedia, pizza was popular in Italy (Naples in particular) already in the 19th century, well before immigrants made it popular in the US.

So I think "Pizza effect" is a bit of a misnomer

Not a misnomer at all. The point is that what Italians now consider pizza is influenced by the American adaptation of the basal dish. That's the whole point.

right, but as an Italian I tend to disagree :D

Wondering the same thing myself. What toppings got imported into Italy from the US? Certainly not things like pineapple!

Maybe things like prosciutto cotto (ham) or salamino piccante ("peperoni") ?

Pineapple as a pizza topping is apparently a Canadian thing [0].

> Greek-Canadian Sam Panopoulos claimed that he created the first Hawaiian pizza at the Satellite Restaurant in Chatham, Ontario, Canada in 1962.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_pizza

Tomatoes.

Not the US, but from the Americas.

But that was before "pizza" as such was even invented, so I don't think that's really what this article was about.