Which came first, Fanta or pizza?

pizza came first, by 160 years. Tomato-topped flatbread was being sold in Naples.

Side by side

Fanta

When the war cut Coca-Cola GmbH off from American syrup, its head Max Keith made a drink from what was available in Germany — whey left over from cheese making and apple pomace left over from cider pressing. The name came from a brainstorming session where staff were told to use their imagination, Fantasie. Sprite arrived 21 years later in 1961, developed from a German lemon drink Coca-Cola had launched in 1959, so Fanta comfortably predates it.

pizza

Flatbreads with toppings are ancient, but pizza in the sense people mean — wheat base, tomato, baked in a wood oven — dates from Naples in the late 1700s, and could not have existed earlier because tomatoes only reached Europe from the Americas in the 16th century and were widely thought poisonous for two hundred years. The Margherita story, in which a Naples pizzaiolo created a red, white and green pizza for Queen Margherita in 1889, rests on a single document now widely believed to be a forgery. The first American pizzeria, Lombardi's in New York, was licensed in 1905.