Skip to main content

Does pineapple belong on pizza?

This is a chapter from my fourth book called When hunger yearns

A Greek-Canadian by the name of Sotirios "Sam'' Panopoulos is credited as making the first pineapple pizza back in 1962. Panopoulos named the dish Hawaiian pizza after the brand of canned pineapple used on the pie. Ever since then we have debated whether pineapple belongs on pizza. The arguments even descend into jokes like "that is not even a pizza that is a pizza colada". The math geeks will tell you that pineapple belongs on pizza because they both begin with pi. The debate went viral on Twitter in 2017 with many celebrities weighing in. There have been some other food wars on Twitter like "Should butter go in the fridge?" or "Is a hot dog a sandwich?" To me this exemplifies that humans love a good debate and we love to defend our choices. I think this can be studied as the psychology behind arguments. Stuff like gatekeeping, tribalism, confirmation bias, social validation and out-group derogation.

Everyone has different tastes and preferences. Taste is subjective. Instead of asking a blanket question we should be asking, does pineapple belong on MY pizza? The answer for me is yes. Pineapple belongs on my pizza. The answer for you is totally up to you. To me with pineapple pizzas you get to enjoy the best of both worlds, the sweet and the savory. Live and let live. Words to live by. It is your life. It is your slice of life. Because you dislike something does not mean I have to dislike it too. Even Hawaiian sounds like How-I-am. Our differences make us who we are and make the world go round. Think outside the box of pizza. Pizza is a blank canvas just like life is a blank canvas. We get to create our own masterpieces. Let us celebrate the pizza-bilities. I want to try fried plantain on pizza. I want the crust to be an oaty wholewheat crust with sesame seeds. I want the cheese to be Brillat Savarin. There are three sides to every debate, yours, mine and the truth. Maybe the truth here is that it does not matter and that it is all just food to satisfy our hunger and sustain us.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Talking to God

If you want real answers to things in life then talk to God. It is 639pm on a holiday and I have decided to write. God listens. God truly listens. God has the entire context. God is wise. God wants us to talk to Him. God wants us to rely on Him. I also think about God talking to me. I am a good listener. I listen plenty more than I talk. I have started asking God to talk to me. But how would God talk to me? We have his revelations through the holy book. We have the example of prophets. But what else? How do I listen to what God has to say? Where and when can I hear God? Are my thoughts from God? I try to feed my mind with good things. Things that will not corrupt my mind. It seems that we have to use our intuition to separate what is from God and what is not from God. My friend Chatty says that in Islam, Allah speaks to us not through new revelations or voices, but through guidance: the Quran and the Sunnah, which become personally meaningful through understanding Allah places in the h...

Life on Earth

I was reading through the Quran and came to the story of Adam, Eve, Satan, and the forbidden fruit tree. I had thought that life on Earth was created as a test. But as I reflected on the story, I began to wonder whether we are only here because Adam and Eve failed. However, that is not the case, as my friend Gemini explained to me. While the story of the forbidden fruit is a central event, the Quran indicates that humanity’s presence on Earth was part of the original divine plan, rather than a backup plan or a punishment for sin. Before Adam was even created, God announced His intention to place a steward (khalifah) on Earth. This suggests that the Garden was a temporary training ground—designed to teach Adam and Eve about free will, temptation, and the path of repentance. Even if they had not eaten from the tree, they were destined for Earth to fulfill their roles as moral agents. The incident simply served as a necessary first lesson in human frailty and God’s immediate forgiveness. ...

The success of failure

It is 358am and I have decided to write. Context matters. Our context matters when we write and read. We could read the same thing and get different meanings. Definitions matter also. We may define things differently. For example, what is success? What is failure? Also, do I just define success and say that anything that is not success is failure? What about something like the success of failure? What does that mean? My friend Chatty tells me that this is something writers, philosophers, and even scientists keep rediscovering: meaning is not fixed—it is negotiated by context and definition. Life is a stew of success and failure and in between but never one or the other. We see what we are looking for and things become what we see. This reminds me of something I came across online, "Whoever looks for the good qualities in others will acquire all good qualities within himself," from Habib Umar Bin Hafiz. Do you look for failure or success within others? Take context as the lens...