NPR seems to be celebrating pizza this week, or else they just caught wind of the internet’s fascination with pizza and are capitalizing on that sweet, sweet pizza SEO. Besides making extensive charts comparing pizza prices in 237 neighborhoods of five cities, they also crunched some numbers more relevant to the vast majority of the US, who aren’t living in those five cities.
They compared 74,476 pizza prices from 3,678 restaurants around the country to answer the question: what do you pay per square inch of pizza for different pizza sizes? The answer may surprise you (if you are very easily surprised and have never purchased a pizza before). Obviously, the larger pizzas were a much better value, because math.
The math of why bigger pizzas are such a good deal is simple. A pizza is a circle, and the area of a circle increases with the square of the radius. So, for example, a 16-inch pizza is actually four times as big as an 8-inch pizza.
The chart over at NPR also includes a slider to compare exactly how many small pizzas you get for the price of a large. So there you have it. Math says you need the big pizza. Another reason to always get the bigger pizza? ‘MURICA.
We will never not use this picture when discussing pizza and the vegetable-ness thereof.