Why pizza can never have pineapple: a well-grounded defence

There are debates humanity has been dragging along unresolved for centuries. The existence of God, free will, whether a Spanish omelette should have onion or not. But there is one that transcends philosophy and lands squarely in the territory of dignity: pineapple on pizza. And no, this is not a food article. This is an intervention.

Because putting pineapple on a pizza is not a culinary choice. It is a system failure. A design flaw so profound that, if cooking were code, the compiler would throw a fatal error at you before the dough ever reached the oven. And there is a forty-something programmer stranded in the Namib Desert who would agree with me completely.

The origin of the disaster: a brief history of an abomination

The Hawaiian pizza —a name that is already an insult to Hawaii, to Italy and to the very concept of place names— was invented in 1962 by Sam Panopoulos, a Greek immigrant settled in Canada. It is worth pausing on this fact. A Greek. In Canada. Deciding what should go on an Italian dish. There is something deeply unsettling about that chain of decisions, as if someone had merged three incompatible branches and hit force push without looking at the code.

Panopoulos, by his own account, opened a tin of pineapple in syrup, dumped it onto a ham pizza and thought: "Let us see what happens." The exact phrase that precedes most of the catastrophes documented in the history of engineering. Let us see what happens is what you say before connecting a cable you do not know the destination of, before running a script in production without testing it, before texting your ex at three in the morning. Nothing good has ever come of that phrase.

The chemical argument: when the pH proves you right

Let us set the humour aside for a second —just a second— to talk science. Pineapple contains bromelain, a proteolytic enzyme that breaks down proteins. Do you know what mozzarella has? Proteins. And ham? Proteins. Putting pineapple on a pizza is, literally, letting a tropical fruit digest your dinner before you do. It is not an ingredient, it is a molecular saboteur.

Bromelain is the very reason you cannot make jelly with fresh pineapple: it destroys the structure of collagen. In other words, pineapple not only does not belong on pizza, it actively works against it. It is not that it fails to fit. It is that it is there to destroy. Like a mole infiltrated into the dough, dismantling the cheese's casein while everyone looks the other way.

And then there is the matter of water. Pineapple is 86% water. A pizza needs dry heat so the dough turns crisp and the cheese browns to that perfect point between golden and obscene. Adding pineapple is like watering an electronic circuit and expecting it to work better. It does not work better. It short-circuits. It soaks. It turns into a sad, soggy thing that nobody ordered.

The Italian argument: when an entire country tells you no

Italy has many problems: bureaucracy, the traffic in Rome, the collective inability to form a government that lasts more than eighteen months. But if there is one thing on which fifty-nine million Italians agree —including those who agree on nothing else— it is that pineapple does not go anywhere near a pizza. The Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, which has been certifying authentic Neapolitan pizza since 1984, does not mention pineapple in its statutes. Not because it explicitly bans it, but because mentioning it would strike them as as absurd as including a clause that read "no yoghurt either."

In 2017, the President of Iceland publicly declared that, if he could, he would ban pineapple on pizza. A head of state. Talking about toppings. At an official event. That gives you an idea of the scale of the problem: when international diplomacy has to pronounce on an ingredient, something has gone terribly wrong.

The logical argument: pizza is not a dessert

There is an unwritten rule in the kitchen that works like a programming axiom: every function should do one thing, and do it well. Pizza is savoury. It is melted cheese, tomato, fermented dough, salt, olive oil. It is a closed, coherent system. Introducing pineapple —sweet, acidic, tropical, wet— is like dropping a try-catch block inside a for loop that already worked: technically it can be done, but the result is unreadable code that nobody wants to maintain.

"But the sweet-savoury contrast works," say the defenders of the abomination. Fine. Chocolate with salt works too. And jam with cheese. And nobody is proposing to put strawberry jam on a margherita. The fact that two flavours can coexist in some context does not mean they should in every one. I can put a chair in a swimming pool. That does not turn it into a float.

The existential argument: what pineapple says about you

There is something that goes beyond taste. Ordering a pizza with pineapple is a statement of principle. It says you are comfortable in chaos, that you find conventions to be mere suggestions, and that you probably pour the milk before the cereal too. It is not necessarily a character flaw, but it is a tell. Like those lines of code that work but which, when you open them up six months later, you cannot understand what they do or why they are there.

Chema, the protagonist of my latest novel, is crystal clear on this. He is a programmer in his forties who, among his many unshakeable convictions, holds that pineapple on pizza is the definitive proof that humanity does not deserve a second chance. And this comes from a guy who accepts a suicidal challenge on Twitter and ends up wandering the Namib Desert for twenty-three days. A man dragging himself across dunes at forty-five degrees can afford the luxury of dying of dehydration, but he would never eat a Hawaiian pizza. There are limits.

The impossible defence: what the people who are wrong say

In the name of intellectual honesty —and because even an article written with a declared bias must acknowledge that the other side exists— let us review the arguments in favour of pineapple on pizza. The first is "I like it." Correct. There are also people who like getting up early and people who enjoy meetings that could have been an email. Liking something does not make it acceptable. I would like to keep a lion at home. That does not make it a good idea.

The second argument is the culinary tradition of combining sweet and savoury. Duck à l'orange, chicken curry with mango, sweet-and-sour pork. All valid. All with centuries of gastronomic evolution behind them. Hawaiian pizza is sixty years old and was born of a Greek in Ontario who opened a tin. It is not the same. A racing car and a shopping trolley both have four wheels, but nobody confuses them in a race.

The third argument, and the most dangerous, is that of "individual freedom." Let everyone put whatever they want on their pizza. Agreed. Everyone can do whatever they want with their life. But decisions have consequences, and one of them is that the pizza maker will look at you with a mix of pity and bewilderment he does not even reserve for the customer who asks for gluten-free.

Conclusion: the red line you do not cross

There are things that define a person. The big decisions, the moments of crisis, the way they treat others when no one is watching. And what they put on their pizza. Chema, stranded in a desert with no water, no food and no signal, spent twenty-three days solving impossible problems with a programmer's logic and humour so dark it absorbed light. But not even at his worst moment —not when his body was failing, not when his mind began to play tricks on him, not when hope was a more abstract concept than a pointer in C— would it have occurred to him that pineapple could go on a pizza.

Because there are extreme situations. And then there are abominations.

And Chema always knew how to tell them apart.