Neatorama

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• Pizza is More American than Italian
• You Can Eat Beaver, Alligator, and Armadillo Meat During Lent
• Almost Pong is a One-Button Game

Pizza is More American than Italian Posted: 05 Mar 2022 07:23 AM PST Yeah, we know, pizza originated in Naples, where it was street food for poor people. It's also true that Margherita of Savoy made it acceptable in other parts of Italy, although it was still not popular. But it was the US more than any other country that made pizza what it is today, and fairly recently in the grand scheme of things. Before 1880, most Italians who immigrated to the US were from northern Italy, and did not eat pizza. Four million southern Italians arrived between 1880 and 1910, but their pizza still wasn't popular.     The first successful pizza restaurant in the world located outside of Naples was founded in Buenos Aires in 1882, when a Neapolitan immigrant baker named Nicolas Vaccarezza started selling the pies out of his shop in Boca. For reference purposes, a decade earlier, an attempt to open a pizzeria in Rome, Italy, had ended in bankruptcy, meaning, at the turn of the last century, you could get a pizza in Buenos Aries, São Paulo or New York, but not in Rome, Florence or Venice. Only after World War II did pizza take off, as American entrepreneurs invested in pizza ovens, diverse toppings, delivery, and entertainment for diners. Now pizza is readily available in Italy, mainly because American tourists expect it. Read how all that happened at An Eccentric Culinary History.  -Thanks, H.D.!

You Can Eat Beaver, Alligator, and Armadillo Meat During Lent Posted: 05 Mar 2022 03:23 AM PST Lent is the 40-day period leading up to Easter, meant for abstinence and penitence, observed most formally in the Catholic Church. The current rules for Lent are that Catholics age 14 and up must must abstain from meat on fast days (Ash Wednesday and Good Friday) and all Fridays during Lent. There is an exception for the chronically ill and pregnant or nursing mothers. That's why churches have fish fries on Fridays and how McDonald's came to serve the Filet-O-Fish. Fish is not considered to be meat. But over the history of the Catholic Church, the question of what is meat and what isn't has been asked again and again. The original idea was to avoid basic livestock meat like beef, pork, and poultry. The rules for eating wild animals came up over time as Catholicism spread to different parts of the world, and local bishops made rulings that had little to do with biology, but a lot to do with the foods local people depended on. The reasoning for each animal varied. In Canada, beaver is classified as a fish for the purposes of Lent because it is an aquatic animal. In the southern US, Alligator is considered a fish for the same reason. And in Central and South America, capybara is okay to eat during Lent, and has even become a traditional Lenten dish, because the animal spends so much time in lakes and rivers.    Other animals have received dispensation to be consumed during Lent not by being classified as fish, but because they were deemed essential to nutrition for the local population. In the Detroit area, muskrat is okay to consume during Lent because at the time the question came up, food of any kind was really scarce. Iguana and armadillo flesh also qualifies, and both are Lenten staples in Nicaraugua. Puffins were once forbidden to eat during Lent, but in the 17th century were allowed because doctors testified that "the biological and nutritional qualities of puffins made them more like fish than birds." From this we can assume that the porgs of the planet Ahch-To are okay to eat on Lenten Fridays, because they were based on puffins. Read how these exemptions came about at the Lafayette Daily Advertiser. -via Fark (Image credit: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

Almost Pong is a One-Button Game Posted: 04 Mar 2022 05:50 PM PST Thomas Palef made a game so simple that it can't possibly be challenging, right? Wrong. Almost Pong has the same goal as Pong, in that you are batting a ball back and forth between two paddles (yeah, like ping pong). The difference is that there's only you, and only one button, which is your spacebar or your mouse. There's not even a start button. The kicker here is that you are playing as the ball. While the instructions and gameplay are simple, you have to adjust your reflexes from the paddles to the ball, which might take a couple of rounds. Oh, yeah, you do not have control of the paddles. They will move at random, but so far they have given me plenty of warning. That might change if you play for longer than I've managed to. Almost Pong is mindless but simple fun, at least at lower levels. -via Kottke

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