By Dawn Smith-Pfeifer
Have you ever wondered where we get all our "national" food days? Just in the month of February alone, we are celebrating foods as varied as National Baked Alaska Day to National Crab-Stuffed Flounder Day. (The latter sounds a little too fishy to me.)
Fishy foods aside, and getting back to the question at hand: How do these national food days come about? After an exhaustive search of three websites, I came to the conclusion that, for the most part, it's all about marketing.
In other words, someone was tasked with boosting sales of something and someone in the marketing department said, "HEY! Let's make a day of it!" And so we get things like National Frog Legs Day, which only occurs in leap years (Hee! Hee! Get it?) because it's on February 29. Hey, at least these marketing folks have a sense of humor.
But just this week, I could have celebrated National Creme-Filled Chocolates, National Clementine Day, National Gumdrop Day and National Almond Day and it's only Wednesday!
Don't even get me started on the days devoted to pizza. Okay, I was already going there anyway. National Pizza Day was February 9. Then there's National Cheese Pizza Day on Sept. 5., National Pepperoni Pizza Day on Sept. 20 and whoa, International Beer and Pizza day is coming on October 9. But that's not all. National Sausage Pizza Day is on Oct, 11 and Nov. 12 is National Pizza with the Works, except Anchovies Day (which suits me fine because as I alluded to in the beginning of this post, I'm just not that fond of fishy things).
But we don't just celebrate pizza, we celebrate days to get together with others and have a pizza party! That's National Party Day and it’s on May 21.
Here's a fun little pizza fact: On any given day, one in eight Americans will eat pizza and more than 3 billion (yeah, with a b) pizzas will be consumed this year. We do love our pizza. And just so you know how much, come October, you can celebrate the entire month with pizza because it's -- you guessed it -- National Pizza Month.
Since all these food days are about marketing, I'm going to make a shameless plug and share a video that not only makes a pizza, but shows you the farmers who produce the ingredients for that pizza.