---
title: "Which came first, pizza or the United States?"
description: "pizza vs the United States: the United States came first, by 4 years — 1776 against 1780. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/pizza-vs-united-states/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, pizza or the United States?

**Which came first, pizza or the United States?: the United States**

1776 — 4 years before pizza

the United States came first, by 4 years. The Declaration of Independence was adopted.

## Side by side

|  | pizza | the United States |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1780 | 1776 |
| Date | — | 1776-07-04 |
| Category | food | country |
| What happened | Tomato-topped flatbread was being sold in Naples. | The Declaration of Independence was adopted. |

## 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.

## the United States

The date used here is the Declaration, 4 July 1776, which is the one people mean. Two others have equal claim: Britain recognised independence in 1783, and the Constitution took effect in 1789, so the current government is younger than the country by thirteen years. The United States is older as a state than Germany (1871), Italy (1861), Canada (1867) and modern Japan (1868).

## Common questions

### Which came first, pizza or the United States?

the United States, by 4 years — 1776 against 1780.

### When did pizza start?

1780. Tomato-topped flatbread was being sold in Naples.

### When did the United States start?

1776. The Declaration of Independence was adopted.

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## Sources

- Typical range compiled from manufacturer specifications — At One Place (/about/)
- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (https://www.wikidata.org/) [CC0 1.0]