Happy New Year! From time to time, I wade into a controversial topic here on taxpoodle.net. Really existential questions like should you drape the loose sheet of toilet paper over or under the roll, and whether there is any real difference between catsup and ketchup. I do this not to advocate any position other than expound on my own, though Joan Didion suggested that the act of writing is by its very nature one of advocacy:
In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.
Joan Didion, Why I Write, January 26, 2021
But as we begin this new year, sliding into fascism, depleting our natural resources and destroying the Earth in the process, and coming to grips with yet another senseless act of violence, this one in New Orleans, I thought I would address what is, perhaps, the most universally controversial topic of all. One that has split families at the dining room table, has turned friends into enemies, and has been the straw that broke the camel’s back ending many a marriage or relationship or being the bridge too far that prevented the coupling from happening in the first place. College roommates have gone to resident advisors asking to be moved when they found out what the person they shared a room with was into, children have been disowned, careers have been tanked. The debate sparks great passion.
The old guard appeals to tradition. Today, progressives and the younger generations call that tradition into question, and rightly so, challenging it with a more nuanced understanding of the history from which the tradition came. For some it’s a matter of personal liberty: free will means we are free to choose, and in that freedom there is no right and wrong choice.
I am of course talking about whether you should put pineapple on pizza.
While some, like myself, crave the sweet, sour, and salty combination of fruit combined with meat, dough, and melted cheese, others reading this just threw up in their mouths a little bit. Let’s take a look at this pressing societal concern.
The first thing I do when I’m trying to get to the bottom of something is research its origin. Who woke up one morning and said, “enough with all the vegetables, what pizza needs is fruit?” His name was Sam Panopoulos. He was a Greek immigrant who moved to Canada in 1954. He first put pineapple on pizza at his restaurant, Satellite, located in Chatham, Canada.
Satellite was mainly a burger joint, but Sam wanted to expand his menu and so he started experimenting with different foods like pizza; he needed a marketing gimmick to attract attention, so he threw some pineapple and Canadian bacon (ham) on a pizza. He called his new creation “Hawaiian” for one simple reason – the can the pineapples came in said “from Hawaii.”
Some appeal to natural law at this point. They will tell you that mixing something savory like meat and something sweet like fruit goes against nature and the natural order of things. They seem to be ignorant of the fact that the tomato sauce on a pizza is itself derived from a fruit – the tomato.
Then you get those who appeal to tradition. Their refrain, “but that’s how it’s always been,” is as false as it is ludicrous. So is their assertion that there is a truly “universal” way to prepare pizza based on the “Italian” method, and this is a tomato-based sauce over a round thin “pie” of baked dough with a few slices of fresh mozzarella thrown on top (and maybe a basil leaf). I happen to like that, but it’s not the Italian way, it’s called a Pizza Napolitano and comes from Naples. However, if you go just a few miles north to Rome, you’ll get a thick dough baked in a square pan and topped with meats. Now, last I checked, Rome and Naples are both cities in the country of Italy. Can one city claim to be representative of all Italy and therefore that their pizza is an exemplar and made the archetypal “Italian” way?
South African foodie and food writer Tayla Blaire points out:
Most culinary traditions stem from necessity. People in Naples made pizza this way because they had no other way to make it. You can see a similar pretention with ‘traditional’ pasta meals in Italy. Southern Italy has a tradition of pasta with just a hint of sauce, often using simple ingredients like garlic, olive oil, and balsamic to garnish a large dish of pasta. Many foodies would look at this tradition and insist that this simply has to be done this way because “that’s how it was meant to be eaten!”
In reality, peasants from the southern regions of Italy have been historically poorer than their northern-region compatriots whose cuisine consisted of more meat, lard, and milk than theirs. The poor of southern Italy ate large volumes of pasta with little sauce because there was no abundance of ingredients for the sauce – in short, the tradition stemmed from necessity. And, as always happens, the upper classes soon took a liking to the rustic traditions of the lower classes and made pasta with little sauce into something ‘authentic’ and ‘traditional’. In reality, if the peasants had more access to different foods, Italian cuisine today might look a lot different.
I don’t expect that settles it, as people are committed to their position and go to great lengths to defend it. The difference of opinion caused a minor international incident; in 2017 when the president of Iceland, Gudni Johannesson, visited a primary school, he told the children that, given the chance, he would ban pineapple on pizza – people all over the world sent Hawaiian pizzas to the Icelandic embassy in their country in protest! President Johannesson was forced to back down.
In response to the President of Iceland Incident of 2017, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, mindful of the fact that the Hawaiian pizza originated in his country, took to Twitter (now X), posting: “I have a pineapple. I have a pizza. And I stand behind this delicious Southwestern Ontario creation. #TeamPineapple.”
Also in the I like Hawaiian pizza camp with me is Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. He wrote on Instagram, “As for my pizza toppings – keep in mind, I’m the guy who likes to put tequila and brown sugar in my oatmeal, so pineapple on pizza is MY JAM — with ham.” Given my own troubled relationship with tequila, I cannot endorse his suggestion for oatmeal, but he’s spot on when it comes to pizza. I may give his movies a second look.