The quintessential American school lunch of the 1970s and 80s, a bologna sandwich on white bread with mayonnaise (*shudder*) is only American in the sense that it is the bastardized version of a culinarily superior food first brought to the United Stated by immigrants from the other side of the world. Though pronounced “baloney” – itself an accepted spelling of the word here in the U.S. – bologna’s proper spelling betrays its obvious etymological origins. I’m of course speaking about the famed salumi of Bologna, Italy: mortadella.

So how did mortadella, the pride of Northern Italy, wind up being processed, pasteurized and whatever the opposite of perfected is, over the course of hundreds of years? How did it get smacked alongside a Kraft single in a nutritionally dubious midday meal for millions of U.S. students everyday? This is the story of bologna – the lunchmeat.