National Pizza Day 2024: Slice into some absurd facts

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It's National Pizza Day - so let's wrap ourselves in the warm, gooey embrace of cheese, settle into a heavenly array of toppings and chomp down on some delectable crust.

The celebration comes every February 9, but it's hardly the only pizza-positive spot on the calendar. Still to come: National Cheese Pizza Day (September 5), National Pepperoni Pizza Day (September 20), National Pizza Month (October) and National Sausage Pizza Day (October 11).

There's no doubt about it - folks do love their pizza in all its forms.

Here are some absurd pizza facts, helpful tips and strong opinions to fuel your munching:

2024 might be the year that pineapple pizza cracks Italy, thanks to Gino Sorbillo.

He's a renowned Naples pizzaiolo (pizza maestro) who has added the dreaded ananas to his menu in Via dei Tribunali, the best known pizza street in the world capital of pizza. Not everyone is happy about this, though.

Pizza was ranked as the food most associated with addiction-like eating behaviors, according to a study that used the Yale Food Addiction Scale.

Its delicious combination of fat and carbohydrates, along with its texture, color and complimentary taste profile are among the traits that make it so appealing.

If you're thinking Chicago or New York, you're wrong. At least that's the somewhat recent opinion of the authors of the encyclopedic "Modernist Pizza." Learn which West Coast city trumps the old pizza standbys.

Sorpresa! 50 Top Pizza, an international guide run by Italians, created some waves in 2023 when it pronounced that the best pizza in Europe was in fact not to be found in Italy. This is the country that usurped that honor.

In the late 1960s, the US Army's 113th Military Intelligence Unit used the tastiest trick in their book - making pizza deliveries - to spy on reporters and politicians, according to The New Yorker magazine.

Guinness World Records has recorded a seemingly endless list of pizza records. Here are just a few:

World's largest pizza: In Los Angeles, Pizza Hut and YouTube star Airrack set a new record for the world's largest pizza, coming in at 13,990 square feet.

Longest pizza delivery: In 2006, Paul Fenech traveled 12,346.6 miles (19,780 kilometers) from Madrid to Wellington, New Zealand, to hand-deliver a pizza to Niko Apostolakis. CNN could not find any record of whether the pizza was freezing cold by the time it got there or whether Apostolakis actually ate that thing.

Highest altitude pizza delivery on land: Good news! If you can make it to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, you might be able to persuade Pizza Hut to deliver a victory meal to you. They've done it before, after all.

Even the folks at PETA love digging into pizza as long as the pies are "all friendly to cows, pigs, and chickens and packed with flavor."

The animal rights advocates have come out with their top vegan favorites from Las Vegas to Philadelphia.

Italian anti-Mafia police tracked down and arrested a suspected mobster in France, where he was working under an alias as a pizzaiolo.

In this case, we're not being absurd. It's perfectly doable to make your own delicious pizza dough at home. If you're feeling daunted by the idea, Stanley Tucci, the host of CNN's "Searching for Italy," guides the way.

CNN's Forrest Brown, Julia Buckley, Elizabeth Wolfe and Brian Ries contributed to the 2024 version of this story, first published in 2020.