Social context

Pizza's shift from working-class food to a food eaten across class lines

Pizza's documented history runs from cheap Neapolitan street food for the urban poor, through affordable immigrant-community food in the Americas, to a mainstream food eaten across nearly every income bracket in the postwar United States — accelerated by returning servicemen, national chain expansion, and frozen supermarket pizza from the 1950s onward — and, later still, a fashionable and sometimes expensive artisan product. Pizza is unusual in having genuinely occupied multiple class positions across its history, which is why a blanket claim that it is either 'poor people's food' or 'trendy food' is incomplete without specifying which era and market is meant.