Pizza Perfection - © pastaprincessandmore.com

A Large Pizza is always cheaper!

What Pizza lover has never faced the conundrum of what size pie to buy? How do you know you’re getting your best buy per slice? Well, National Public Radio in the States has conducted an exhaustive survey and come up with what looks like a definitive answer!

Pizza Price Comparison - © NPR.comThese statistics don’t lie! NPR surveyed more than 74,000 U.S. pizza joints
and plotted cost per square inch against pie size.

NPR surveyed more than 74,000 Pizza joints across that pie-lovin’ land, ran its figures through the computer and came up with the following unexpected results:

Your best buy, per square inch of Pizza, is always the Large!

How can that be, you say?

Simple. We’re talking a matter of simple geometry. In the case of a Pizza, ideally a perfectly round, flat surface:

Area = 3.14 x (r x r)

…commonly expressed as: “Pie are squared”.

(Now, we all know Pies are round, but that’s a really old joke and it’s just going to confuse the situation further…)

Happily, the multiples rule for area is the same whether your pies are round or square. So we’ll demonstrate NPR’s findings using the simpler formula for the area of a square:

Area = Height x Width

It’s clear as the olives on your slice that an 8″ x 8″ square contains 64 square inches in area.

And a 16″ x 16″ square contains 256 square inches of area.

So… A 16″ large Pizza is not just twice the size of an 8″ personal Pizza – it’s 4 times the size, in area!

NPR totals the take…

So… The NPR survey concludes that, based on the surface area of pizza involved, you’d have to buy four 8″ pies to equal the amount of pie in one 16″ pie.

But… NPR also found that an 8″ pie in the U.S. costs, on average, a little over $8. while a 16″ pie costs just $16.50. Do the math. You’re paying twice as much for the same amount of Pizza if you order it all in 8″ size!

Who was it said, back in high school, that stupid ol’ Math was useless in real life?

The moral(s) of this story…

1. Things are often not as they seem.

2. Who doesn’t love leftover pizza? Order 2 large!

3. Rocket Science sometimes has its charms…

~ Maggie J.