National Pizza Day 2023: Slice into some absurd facts

By Elizabeth Wolfe and Brian Ries, CNN

National Pizza Day may have melted away like mozzarella, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still wrap ourselves in the warm, gooey embrace of cheese, settle into a heavenly array of toppings and chomp down on some comforting crust.

Besides, although the February 9 celebration has passed, there’s still National Cheese Pizza Day (September 5), National Pepperoni Pizza Day (September 20), National Pizza Month (October) and National Sausage Pizza Day (October 11) to look forward to.

There’s no doubt about it — folks do love their pizza.

Here are some absurd pizza facts, helpful tips and strong opinions to fuel your days of munching:

Do you crave pizza? There’s a reason

Pizza was ranked as the food most associated with addictive-like eating behaviors, according to a study that used the Yale Food Addiction Scale.

Its delicious combination of fat and carbohydrates, along with its texture, color and complimentary taste profile are among the traits that make it so appealing.

AI is coming for your slice

Is nothing sacred? The reach of artificial intelligence has expanded into pizza artistry.

Researchers have figured out a way to teach an AI system how to construct a pizza by looking at a picture.

Pizza is just the beginning, though. If a computer can figure out how to properly layer the ingredients of a pizza, it may be able to better understand how to construct other foods or eventually be able to layer clothes into an outfit, project leader Dimitrios Papadopoulos told CNN Business.

Pizza as a tool of military intelligence

In the late 1960s, the US Army’s 113th Military Intelligence unit used the tastiest trick in their book — making pizza deliveries — to spy on reporters and politicians, according to The New Yorker.

Can anything top this crime caper?

Italian anti-Mafia police tracked down and arrested a suspected mobster in France, where he was working under an alias as a pizzaiolo — or pizza chef.

People love setting pizza records

Guinness World Records has recorded a seemingly endless list of pizza records. Here are just a few:

World’s largest pizza: In Los Angeles this past January, Pizza Hut and YouTube star Airrack set a new record for the world’s largest pizza, coming in at 13,990 square feet.

Longest pizza delivery: In 2006, Paul Fenech traveled 12,346.6 miles (19,780 kilometers) from Madrid to Wellington, New Zealand, to hand-deliver a pizza to Niko Apostolakis. CNN could not find any record of whether the pizza was freezing cold by the time it got there or whether Apostolakis actually ate that thing.

Highest altitude pizza delivery on land: Good news! If you can make it to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, you might be able to persuade Pizza Hut to deliver a victory meal to you. They’ve done it before, after all.

Best pizza city in the USA

If you’re thinking Chicago or New York, you’re wrong. At least that’s the relatively recent opinion of the authors of the encyclopedic “Modernist Pizza.” Click here to learn which city trumps the old pizza standbys.

Make you own pizza dough

In this case, we’re not being absurd. It’s perfectly doable to make your own delicious pizza dough at home. If you’re feeling daunted by the idea, Stanley Tucci, the host of CNN’s “Searching for Italy,” guides the way.

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CNN’s Forrest Brown contributed to the 2023 version of this story, first published in 2020.