A great piece in Salon about unique pizzas in different US areas that “exist outside a certain radius”:
“I didn’t realize Indian pizza was regional until very recently,” muses Bromfield, who’s the creator of the ascendant Regional American Foods Twitter account. He started it in January 2021; it now has more than 108,700 followers. “I wonder if that isn’t the case with a lot of folks who grow up with certain foods. They might not even realize that they don’t exist outside a certain radius.”
All manner of regional food treasures grace the @RegionalUSfood feed, from Kool-Aid-soaked dill pickles (Mississippi Delta) to comically enormous pounded pork tenderloin sandwiches (Indiana). But the posts I’m most drawn to feature pizza — the practically universal American comfort food that we love to bastardize. At first, Bromfield mostly scoured Wikipedia to unearth such edible quirks as cheese-less Rhode Island pizza strips, heavily sauced and doled out at room temp (which you’ll find at bakeries, not pizzerias). He’d share them with his then-few dozen followers, who were mostly Bromfield’s friends. The account started drawing buzz this spring, as more people shared or tagged @RegionalUSfood in their own posts and started DMing Bromfield with suggestions. Before long, pop culture and food sites got wind of it.
If you’re Italian, I’m sorry but direct your ire at the US.