Pizza in America: mafia, slices and why eating a whole pie is a no-no

Since coming to the US I have often wondered why Americans, who otherwise seem to be in love with pizza, find it absolutely strange to eat a whole pie on your own. In Italy - and pretty much everywhere else in Europe I have traveled to - the common thing is to order an entire pizza, thin crust, and eat the whole thing. In America I noticed that this is not the case. (I am obviously talking about the round Neapolitan style pizza, not the pizza al taglio).

This is how pizzas are served in the rest of the World. Not by the slice

If I can understand why you wouldn't (you couldn't, actually) eat an entire Chicago deep dish pizza on your own, I cannot understand why even thin crust is often served already sliced, and as a dish to share. Plus, in most of NY  restaurants pizza seems to be offered by the slice: a very large slice, from a very large pie. But still a slice.  Don't tell me it is because an entire pizza is too much to eat, because I will laugh in your face.

I hadn't given much thought about the reason behind this until last week. I was having a disappointing BBQ dinner with a couple of friends, and one mentioned that he had read something about the Italian American mafia obliging pizza parlors to sell pizza by the slice. I dig deeper and I found out a couple of interesting things.

As reported by a blogger of the Village Voice, Al Capone, the notorious Mafia boss from Chicago, owned several dairy farms in Wisconsin. To ensure that his farms got all the business they needed, he forced NY pizzerias to use his own cheese on their pizza. This was very different from the mozzarella cheese that Italian pizzazioli in the city were buying from farmers up in New York (incidentally, mozzarella is the only cheese that Wisconsin seems unable to make decently to this present day: for the rest, Wisconsin's cheese is on par - at times better - than any cheese I have tasted from France or Italy).

Apparently - and I admit that I don't understand the reasoning here - Al Capone only allowed certain pizza parlors, like the famous Lombardi, to use good local mozzarella, but only as long as they promised to never sell pizza by the slice. This would also give a new meaning to the many "No Slices" you can see on many awnings in many NY pizzerias: it would be a sort of a code for the Mafia, something saying "don't kill us please, we are using Mafia cheese". Or something like that.

No slices = mafia bought cheese? 

According to many New Yorkers I have talked to - and as noted also on the post I have linked - the cheese served on pizza slices is often inferior to the one you can find on pizza served whole. I don't know if this is because the mafia still controls the cheese distribution, or if it is simply because the pizza parlors selling slices have a bigger need to cut down their costs, so they shop for inferior cheese.

However, I personally believe that if this Al Capone story is true, it could help explain why the pizza slice - nowhere to be found in Italy - is ubiquitous in the US: it all started with the mafia...

Incidentally, it seems that the mafia in the '70s also controlled the olive oil distribution, and that connections between the mafia and pizza parlors are very much still alive, as reported in this cute overview pizza-slice shaped, from the New York Magazine (click on it to view it larger).