Here are a few facts about our favorite dinner/lunch/breakfast/snack/food group, which is currently enjoying its own month.

(We like to imagine that there is a powerful pizza lobby working hard in Washington, D.C., first naming October as Pizza Month in 1987 and now pushing its own pizza-based agenda on an unsuspecting American public, wrangling behind the scenes, bartering late-night deals to make pepperoni a national treasure or some such. Can you see the CNN-worthy event that would occur when East Coast Senators tried passing a bill making New York-style pizza our national food — and then the Illinois Representatives storm the podium, shouting and caterwauling. The entire Senate floor turns into a massive food fight with sauce/cheese/crust mayhem ensuing; all work in the country comes to a standstill as riots break out in the streets — deep dish vs. thin crust — brother against brother — families forced to make difficult choices no family should ever have to make — o, the humanity! But we digress. Ahem. Back to our fun facts.)

• Americans eat, on the average, 350 slices of pizza each second (equal to 100 acres per day).

• There are over 61,000 pizza parlors in the United States.

• Everyone in the United States eats about 23 pounds of pizza yearly. (Please note that Ian’s employees have likely skewed that number higher; self-monitoring indicates that we eat at least three times that amount, and probably more but we just don’t want to admit it.)

• 3 billion pizzas are sold yearly in the United States. Yes, that would be 3,000,000,000.

• 36 % of all pizza orders are pepperoni. (We are working to get 2% of all pizza orders to be topped with mac n’ cheese… any help you could give us would be much appreciated.)

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