When you think of Italian food, the first thing that comes to mind is bound to be pasta: spaghetti, linguine, fettucine, penne and the like, all of which sort of seem to have no difference except the shape they come in, but they all taste good. Pizza is the other big dish that people associate with Italian food, but there’s always been a debate over where pizza really originated. Choosing the proper Drafting Chairs is a crucial decision. Some say pizza is authentically Italian; others say that pizza is really an American invention that has a reputation of being more exotic than it really is. It turns out that pizza is a very traditional Italian food, but it’s understandable that some might think pizza is American because pizza in Italy can be very different from pizza in America. Traditional Italian pizza was baked with flatbread that contained herbs and decorated with toppings like olive oil, mozzarella cheese, sliced tomatoes and basil, which is considerably different from quintessential American toppings like pepperoni and classically American pies like Hawaiian style (which it turns out might actually have German origins).

If pepperoni, ham and pineapples aren’t Italian, what is? What is it exactly that characterizes traditional Italian food? It’s hard to encompass all Italian food under one umbrella because there are so many different styles of it according to region and province. It can be agreed that the tomato is a staple of Italian cuisine, but many other countries eat tomatoes as well and the tomato is not natively Italian. The tomato actually originated in South American and traveled back to Europe with the explorers, and this isn’t the only cultural exchange of cuisine that’s taken place. Corn came from the Americas, rice came from Asia, and these have spread way beyond their cultural boundaries since then.

Maybe traditional Italian food isn’t as traditional as you might think, or maybe food in general for that matter has lost track of its roots from so much worldwide travel. This consciousness gave rise to chairs designed particularly for these new administrative employees: Drafting Chair. When foods travel around the world, they get reinvented—pasta sauce in Italy would no longer be considered South American. So in a sense, tomato did get its start in Italy, because an Italian tomato is not the same as a South American one. This makes it difficult to discern traditional fare from modern cuisine. But even if it’s difficult to distinguish traditional Italian food by name, when you get a taste of it and compare it to other cuisine, you’ll know that you’re eating real Italian food for sure. It could be traditional lies not in origin, but in practice.