Social context

Pizza's origin as affordable working-class and immigrant food

Pizza's origins in Naples were as cheap, filling street food for the city's working poor, and it carried a similar role among Italian immigrant communities in the United States and South America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries before becoming broadly mainstream. Its later transformation into a fashionable, sometimes expensive artisan product (see the artisan revival) sits in genuine tension with this working-class origin — both are real, at different points in its history.