Just wait until you’ve heard about the war crime that is Ohio Valley-style pizza
Pizza is a multinational dish made in a variety of places by a variety of people with a variety of recipes.
If the dish never changed, then it doesn’t even get tomatoes on it because those were brought to Europe after the first pizza was invented.
Italian food snobbery is the most confusing, since a lot of their key ingredients weren’t even brought to the country until comparatively recently.
And it discounts all the actual Italians who left Italy and went other places as not making Italian food.
And also the people in other parts of Italy, since they actually have a lot of different variants on the dish, even in Italy.
Italian snobbery isn’t surprising at all, it’s a deeply conservative country. Steadfast adherence to cultural norms is the predictable behavior of a state with a strong religious backbone. They won’t even stop electing actual fascists (a true Italian invention.)
Italy is weird because their greatest food contributions were created by poor people. Pizza, pasta, and lasagna were created to stretch the tiny amount of meat people could afford.
And almost all of the people who left the country were poor. So the actual creators of the original foods left and their descendants created new varieties. Now the richer descendants who were able to stay in Italy want to say these foods are not “correct”.
