Horse 2228 - Pineapple Has No Business Being On Pizza

 The Fake Internet Court of Australia

THE PEOPLE v PINEAPPLE [2021]

H2228/1

At the weekend, Mrs Rollo and I came to the conclusion that the following items are allowed in a hot dog bun:
- hot dog / sausage: hence the reason for the eponymous food
- onion: this is acceptable
- sauce: tomato, mustard, chili, barbecue
- chili: you can't very well have a chili dog without chili
- cheese: personally I think that this is getting a bit fancy but as Mrs Rollo pointed out - AMERICA!
That's it. Full stop. Story, end of.
You are allowed to have salad on the plate but that goes on the side. If salad finds it's way into a hot dog, then the fundamental laws of the universe are being violated and we risk the earth hurtling off course and careening into the sun. Do you want that on your conscious? I think not.

Naturally as you'd expect, this set the gears in my head spinning and worrying about other fundamental violations of nature. This got me thinking about the laws of pizza.

Meats are acceptable on a pizza. Ground beef, chicken, ham, cabanossi, pepperoni, bacon; even anchovies and prawns are allowable if you happen to be a defective person who thinks that seafood is a good idea. Cheese is also acceptable; in fact many kinds of cheeses including the fancy ones like feta and camembert are allowable if you think that dropping that kind of coin on a pizza is okay. Some vegetables are allowed but this is where the story gets tricky. Garlic, capsicum, tomato, onions, some herbs and spices are allowed to find their way onto a pizza and I suspect that everything on a kebab would also world quite well. There is one thing though, that frequently barges its way into pizza kitchens which surely cannot be allowed to stand any longer and that thing is pineapple.

I don't know if pineapple is a native of the Hawaiian islands or not but under normal circumstances when it comes in concert with ham, it is glorious. For some reason unbeknownst to anyone other than pineapple itself, it arrives on a pizza with ham and then has tried to fool everyone by branding the disaster as Hawaiian pizza. Now I don't have any problem at all with appropriation of the of cuisine from around the world by other countries. Pizza as we know it is very different to the sort of thing that left Italy and is mostly a reinvention by the city of New York. Chicken Tikka Masala could only be possible as the result of the British empire. The meat pie is nominally British but when it comes with mash, peas, gravy and kebab sauce, then that can only come from somewhere antipodean.

According to Wikipedia, which in this case is as reliable as a bunch of people talking to each other at the pub, Hawaiian pizza isn't an invention from Hawaii but of the town of Chatham, Ontario, Canada. Canada of all places? Canada?! These are the same people whose national dish is chips, cheese curds and gravy, which by the way is lovely but also doesn't really have a right to be put together and named as cuisine.
Wikipedia credits it as originating at the Satellite Restaurant in 1962; by a chap named Sam Panopoulos¹. The weird thing is that if you then check the sources in Wikipedia, the Chatham Daily News and the Toronto Sun, they both cite Wikipedia as their source. When you have circuitous logic like this, something is bound to fall over at some point.

Capsicum, garlic, tomato, onion, shallot, pineapple: one of these things just doesn't belong here. Pineapple, no matter how much it tries to force its way past the bouncers, is a fruit. If you suggested that banana, apple, orange, mango or apricot belongs on a pizza, you'd be quite rightly told that you are stark raving bonkers and maybe some chaps in white uniforms might show up and give you a lovely jacket to wear, in which you can hug yourself all day long. Pineapple has about as much business being on a pizza as pumpkin or broccoli does and if you want to put those on a pizza then maybe you should be taken to a place where life is beautiful all the time...

As someone who's only credential in this area of academia is an ill-thought out opinion, I am eminently qualified to dispense judgment on this. If I was sitting in the Supreme Court Of The Internet, which is where appeals from Fake Internet Court² go, then as Grand Poobah and Lord High Everything Else, in the case of The People vs Pineapple (SC109/17) then I find the defendant Pineapple guilty of freeloading and of the tort of passing off.  The meat of this case is just because you often hang around with ham, doesn't automatically confer the right to be on a pizza. To top that off, trying to convince everyone that you belong there is downright deceitful and the only reason that you've gotten away with it for so long is that you've managed to sweet talk your way in. Quite frankly, pineapple on pizza is a load of baloney, or rather, pineapple on pizza.

¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_pizza#cite_note-3
²http://www.maximumfun.org/shows/judge-john-hodgman