THE SLICE ISN’T RIGHT
For a few days, Iceland’s Johannesson was a folk hero opposing a revolting fruit topping
Icelandic leader walks back from vow to ban pineapple on pizza. This only proves we need better laws.
What a shame: There will be no ban on pineapple pizza in Iceland.
For a few days, it looked like a sure victory for those of us opposed to revolting foods. Guoni Thorlacius Johannesson, president of the island nation best known for volcanoes, geysers and Björk, had become a global folk hero after confessing he was “funda- mentally opposed” to the tropical fruit topping.
But after taking this brave stand — and informing high school students he’d be in favour of a national ban — Johannesson walked back his vow.
As with so many politicians, he caved to the powerful PC (Pro-Commingling) lobby that for decades has foisted dangerous sweet-and-sour edicts on vulnerable taste buds.
“I like pineapples, just not on pizza,” Johannesson wrote this week on Facebook, possibly as PC thugs pressed a banana gun into his temple. “I do not have the power to make laws which forbid people to put pineapples on their pizza.” This only proves we need better laws. A ban on pineapple pizza, which could have started in Iceland and spread across the civilized world, should be about as controversial as a ban on ricin cakes. You know how many lives pineapple pizza has improved over the last half-century? Zero.
But what it has done is lowered our gustatory standards by serving as gateway grub, paving the pan for other abominations such as chicken waffles and doughnut burgers. Now widely branded by the PC monsters as “Hawaiian” — probably to avoid armed conflict with Italian chefs — this ghastly dish was invented in Canada. It was the early ’60s and Sam Panopoulos started the trend in Chatham after being influenced by underground pie movements that filtered across the border from Detroit.
“We went down to Windsor a couple of times, and these places, and I said, ‘Let’s try a pizza,’ ” Panopoulos told CBC’s As It Happens on Tuesday. “Then we tried to make some pizza. Along the way, we threw some pineapples on it and nobody liked it at first. But after that, they went crazy about it. Because those days nobody was mixing sweets and sours and all that. It was plain, plain food.”
I think he means, “it was good, good food.” Also, “we threw some pineapples on it” hardly sounds like a game-changing plan. It sounds more like a drunken experiment, which may explain why 98 per cent of all pineapple pizza eaters today are either intoxicated or hungover.
It almost sounds like an accident, the kind of master cooking you can only tolerate from a small child who has lovingly prepared a Mother’s Day breakfast of scrambled strawberry eggs and marmalade ham.
But the key part in that quote is “nobody liked it at first.”
Of course nobody liked it at first, Mr. Panopoulos! Would you like it if someone shredded mango into your fettuccine? Or topped your plate of spaghetti with steaming lychee balls? Did you ever once think, “You know, I bet our customers would really love it if we dunked this cannelloni into that papaya shake.”
So the real mystery is why anyone went “crazy” about pineapple pizza, like, ever.
If you tried to serve this to inmates in some parts of the world, there would be a bloody riot. Even dogs that enjoy eating rocks will instinctively howl and bolt from pineapple pizza. They know better. The mark of any great invention is that it’s impossible to imagine life before.
Some Canadian inventions — zipper, telephone, insulin, snow blower — are so ubiquitous, so ingrained in society, you can’t remember the first time you ever used one.
By contrast, you can definitely remember the first time you tried pineapple pizza. It was also the last time you tried pineapple pizza. The PC propagandists will have you believe a ban on pineapple pizza is a violation of table rights and could open the door to more food discrimination.
They are dead wrong: First they came for my pineapple pizza and I said nothing because pineapple pizza is utterly disgusting.
But if there is an upside to 2017’s #pizzagate, it’s that we’ve been served a reminder of what should qualify as a scandal in a high-functioning, thriving democracy that is not run by an aspiring tyrant.
As Johannesson wrote about his aborted ban: “I am glad that I do not hold such power. Presidents should not have unlimited power. I would not want to hold this position if I could pass laws forbidding that which I don’t like. I would not want to live in such a country.”
Now that’s a delicious observation. vmenon@thestar.ca