The great Hawaiian pizza culture war

By Will Coldwell

The fateful experiment happened in 1962. Sam Panopoulos, a restaurant owner, was not afraid of taking chances. He had left Greece at the age of 20 to start a new life in Canada and went on to run a successful restaurant in downtown Chatham, Ontario. He was also known for his mischievous sense of humour. His fateful culinary creation combined both elements of his personality. While he was making a pizza, he cracked open a can of sliced pineapple – and did the unthinkable.

Sixty years on, the Hawaiian pizza, a standard mozzarella-and-tomato base topped with pineapple and ham or bacon, has become a contender for the most controversial dish ever made. Unlike other joyfully divisive foods (Marmite, anyone?) it’s not enough simply to love or hate it. In an era defined by a propensity for polarisation, the debate over the merits (or failings) of pineapple on pizza has become a global pastime. Profiles on dating apps tease potential matches with the prospect of a food fight. “Do you like pineapple on pizza?” is simultaneously an icebreaker and a dealbreaker. Public figures have taken sides: Paris Hilton loves it; Gordon Ramsay is very angry about it.

The pineapple-pizza debate has become so pervasive that in 2019 the American government launched “The War on Pineapple”, a public-information campaign that illustrated how people can be manipulated through online posts about divisive issues. Why does the Hawaiian pizza provoke such strong opinions? Panopoulos added pineapple, he said, only “for the fun of it”. When the controversy over his creation went viral in 2017 he emerged from retirement to wring his hands. “What’s going on with everybody?” he asked.

The Hawaiian pizza was not always so contentious. In the 1950s and 1960s pizza was still a relative novelty for most Americans. With the advent of domestic freezers, pre-prepared pizza bases offered a blank canvas for self-expression. Recipes in American newspapers suggested trying all manner of non-traditional pizza toppings, including baked potato and sour cream, or even eating pizza as dessert, with sugar, cinnamon and banana on top of melted mozzarella. Views on which toppings were acceptable had not yet hardened into religious dogma.

The post-war period was a time of culinary curiosity and experimentation in North America. Italian cuisine took off in the suburbs, and at the same time Tiki culture, with its cocktails, hula girls and pineapples, blossomed as servicemen returned from the South Pacific. Pineapple upside-down cake became a favourite dessert. Canned pineapple was a major export for Hawaii, which until the 1960s produced three-quarters of global supply. So when Panopoulos created his new fruity pizza it was obvious what to call it: “Hawaiian”. Pineapple was just one of several distinctive American twists on pizza: in California, barbecue chicken became a popular topping, and in Chicago, the deep-dish base reigned supreme. Fashions for different combinations have come and gone, but the Hawaiian remains one of America’s most popular pizzas.

At some point almost every foodstuff has been tried as a pizza topping. Pizza had long been an accessible, popular food since its genesis as a cheap meal for sailors in Naples. But as pizza became a global fast-food phenomenon, it also became a reflection of class: would you celebrate the “authentic” recipe or succumb to a fruit-topped bastardisation of it?

“Do you like pineapple on pizza?” is simultaneously an icebreaker and a dealbreaker

Purists picked on pineapple as an example of how far pizza had drifted from its roots. The tropical novelty was as un-Italian as you could get. Never mind that the upmarket “gourmet” pizzas served in swanky Californian restaurants were just as inauthentic. The Hawaiian pizza crossed a line.

National and cultural pride added bite to the argument. As pizza became Americanised, the nation that created it fought back. “We are against the cultural and commercial deformation of our pizza,” said Antonio Pace, founder of the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana (The True Neapolitan Pizza Association) at the organisation’s launch in 1984. “We just want to affirm our ancient traditions.”

By the 1980s Italian-Americans had risen up the social ranks and some felt their very identity was at stake. In 2002 an Italian-American pizza chef told the New York Times that he had only once put pineapple on a pizza: when a customer who was eight months pregnant told him she was craving it. “But that’s the last time,” he said. Seven years later, when the Neapolitan pizza gained protected status under European law, the same newspaper asked a pizzaiolo in Naples for his opinion: “Pizza with pineapples? That’s a cake.”

Pre-prepared pizza bases offered a blank canvas for self-expression

Despite being one of the most popular pizzas in the world, the Hawaiian became shorthand for inauthenticity, fast food and poor taste. But it took the addition of one final ingredient to amplify and globalise the controversy over Hawaiian pizza: the internet.

Over the past decade online culture has warped real-world disputes, references and ephemera into new, often unrecognisable forms. Social-media platforms have become spaces to discuss cat photos or fall down rabbit holes of extremist politics. Whimsical and accessible, the Hawaiian pizza proved perfect fodder for the internet’s meme machine.

The distinctiveness of pineapple was at home in a realm that relished the celebration (or desecration) of subject matters both arbitrary and weird. Best of all, it was a food with conflict at its heart. It was not the Hawaiian pizza that became a meme, but the debate about Hawaiian pizza. To get involved, you had to have a stance.

In December 2009 a Facebook page named “Pineapple does NOT belong on PIZZA!” was launched. According to Know Your Meme, a database of internet culture, this page started the online chatter. People jumped at the chance to indulge in tongue-in-cheek hyperbole. “It’s OK to be female, male, gay, straight...but it’s never OK to put pineapple on pizza,” declared one meme. Others, taking online debate to its inevitable conclusion, suggested that Adolf Hitler was a fan of the pineapple topping. “Knights of Pineapple”, a Reddit group founded in 2015 which now has 68,000 members, promised to “fight for the deliciousness of pineapples on pizza”.

Would you celebrate the “authentic” recipe or succumb to a fast-food, fruit-topped bastardisation of it?

The debate broke free of online forums. In 2017 the president of Iceland was reportedly asked by a student where he stood on the matter: “I would ban it if I had the power to set laws,” he said. The same year Justin Trudeau, prime minister of Canada, came out swinging for the home team: “I have a pineapple. I have a pizza. And I stand behind this delicious Southwestern Ontario creation. #TeamPineapple,” he tweeted.

Against a backdrop of trolling and takedowns, online echo-chambers and elections disrupted by social media, the pineapple-pizza debate was not really about food at all. It was performative polarisation: a way of mocking the worst aspects of the web. Many issues were becoming almost too fraught to discuss – both online and off – yet here was an inconsequential subject that everyone could weigh in on and argue about, without having to worry about real-world consequences.

Perhaps that explains why pollsters, wrong-footed by the shock results of the Brexit referendum and the American presidential election of 2016, resorted to surveying people about pizza. YouGov determined that 53% of Britons approved of the pineapple topping in 2017 (only a slightly higher share of the population than voted to leave the European Union). Pizza has become something you can profess to care about very strongly, without really caring at all. The dish, often shared and ordered in groups, invites debate and discussion – but friends and foes of pineapple pizza can still dine at the same table. And in practice, most of us will scoff any slice we are given.

The pineapple-pizza debate was an example of performative polarisation

Social-media posts celebrating or lampooning the dish continue. “If 2020 was a pizza topping, it would be pineapple,” is truly a lament of our times. When America’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency wanted to illustrate how foreign actors can exploit hot-button issues, as occurred in 2016 when Russian trolls used “meme warfare” to sow division in America, the pineapple-pizza debate was an obvious and recognisable choice.

The organisation created an infographic to show how the discourse that surrounded the pineapple topping could be politicised and inflamed with statements such as: “being anti-pineapple is un-American” or “millennials are ruining pizza”. Later, having evidently acquired a taste for fruity pizza, the cybersecurity agency collaborated with psychologists at Cambridge University to create an online game designed to “inoculate” players against political misinformation by helping them recognise these processes. In it, players were invited to foment disagreement in the peaceful Harmony Square, a neighbourhood famous for its living statue, its majestic swan – and its annual pineapple-pizza festival.

It took the addition of one final ingredient to amplify the controversy over Hawaiian pizza: the internet

Division, it turned out, was being stoked much closer to home than anyone at the cybersecurity agency could have predicted. In November 2020, after weeks of bluster about electoral fraud, Donald Trump fired Chris Krebs, head of America’s cybersecurity agency, for publicly affirming the integrity of November’s presidential election. Three days later, Krebs tweeted: “I have a confession to make: I actually like pineapple on pizza. Don’t @ me. #WarOnPineapple”. The replies, unsurprisingly, were polarised. But for once they weren’t along partisan lines. The Hawaiian remains a refreshingly low-stakes, light-hearted battle. It’s something everyone can enjoy. A bit like pizza.■

Will Coldwell is a freelance writer and former digital editor at 1843

ILLUSTRATIONS: MICHAEL GLENWOOD