Italian American cuisine is what is commonly called Italian food in the United States. It is in based on the late 19th century and early 20th century cuisines of the Mezzogiorno (southern Italy), particularly that of Sicily, Calabria and Campania, the homeland of most of the 1880-1920 wave of Italian immigrants to the United States through the Ellis Island.Italian and Italian-American cooking have diverged for over a century and by the early 21st century there are many important resultant differences, one of the most significant is the use of greater quantities of meat. This is partly due to the greater prevalence of meat in the American diet, or the influence of early 20th-century US local governmental social services to improve (at least in the eyes of contemporary medical thinking) the largely vegetable-based diet of early Italian-American communities.