"HOW IT FEELS TO BE PINEAPPLE PIZZA LOVER ME"
AKSHAY PATIL
Pizza used to be the great equalizer: in the eternal words of Michael Scott, “rich people love pizza. Poor people love pizza. White people love pizza. Black people love pizza.” This universal love of all types of pizza by all people was undeniably real until a fateful day in 1962 when 20-year-old Sam Panopoulos, a Grecian immigrant to Canada, cemented himself into the list of the top 20, maybe top 10 most controversial people in the history of pizza. He did what some thought was crazy, even blasphemous to the sacred art of pizza making; he put pineapples on pizza. Yes, pineapples on pizza. He later reflected on this revolutionary development and said that “We just put it on, just for the fun of it.” What a visionary. And just like that, the simple act of a 20-year-old new face in the pizza industry putting pineapple on a pizza sparked a raging debate over whether or not pineapples belong on pizza that is still going strong today, 56 years later. World leaders have even weighed in; last year, the president of Iceland said that pineapples didn’t belong with pizza, he said that they were unwelcome outsiders, and then a remarkable thing happened. Justin Trudeau tweeted that he would “stand behind” pineapple on pizza. This tweet was the second most important time in 2017 he fought for something’s right to stay where it was; him fighting for DACA recipients’ right to remain in America just edged this out.
I am an avid supporter of pineapples and their contributions to pizza culture, but my opinion places me in a minority of pizza lovers. The online pizza delivery app Slice conducted a large-scale poll last year and found that a majority of users believe that pineapples don’t belong on pizza and think that they should go back to where they came from, the fruit kingdom. They feel that the sweet and savory cannot mix, that we can’t celebrate their differences and let them get along and work together. It stings a little bit. It stings when you eat some pineapple and jalapeno pizza, and everyone looks at you weird as if you are eating some ethnic food that they have never seen before while they munch down on their plain white cheese pizza. It stings when people assumptions about you like that just because you like pineapples on pizza, you also love Hawaiian pizza. I mean come on, no one likes Hawaiian pizza, and it’s not even Hawaiian. Just because there are some terrible pizzas with pineapples on them doesn’t mean that all pizzas with pineapples on them suck. It’s just a bad stereotype. This sounds an awful lot like some other discrimination that I just can’t put my finger on. Am I just going crazy? I probably am; I am writing an essay on how pineapple pizzas get “othered,” so I’m pretty far down the rabbit hole.
Why do people get pleasure out of discrimination, why does “othering” groups of people hold such happiness for people. Let’s dive into the root causes of one of humanity’s greatest shortcomings, a problem that intellectuals have been puzzled by for generations, a problem that is the root cause of many of the societal problems we have today in this unmistakably intellectual essay about pineapples and pizzas. Let’s take a quick trip to 1750. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had just published Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, and within this essay was a curious term, “amour proper.” Rousseau argued that as civilization developed, humanity’s corruption grew alongside it. He distinguished two types of “self-love,” “amour de soi” that was based on our interest in our health and survival and “amour proper.” The latter is based on our relationships with others and the recognition we receive from those around us rather than strictly based on ourselves and our biological needs like “amour de soi.” As our social relationships grew in number and importance with the advent of civilization, this form of self-love became more and more important to how we viewed ourselves and our worth. This idea of how society forced humans to derive their pleasure from others may explain why discrimination and “otherization” have such a grip on our world. Subjugation and exertion of dominance over others give people the feeling of absolute power; they derived a sort of pleasure from inciting pain in others because it created a power dynamic between them and the other people in which they held all the chips. The development of relationships between “inferior” and “superior” groups grew out of this basic principle; the “inferior” peoples’ appeasement of their masters generated self-love in their masters; they were recognized as the more powerful, intelligent, and dominant people by those under them, and that went to their heads. It is humanity’s derivation of pleasure out of relationships with others that Rousseau argues is the root cause of social inequality and the development of the abstract notion of an “inferior” other.
After writing this seemingly disconnected essay which was on the brink of being incomprehensible gibberish, I asked myself “Why did I decide to write this essay on a seemingly trivial thing like pineapples”? I could have written about how it feels to be immigrant me, or how it feels to be minority me. I could have written about racism or the “otherization” that I have had to face in my short time on this Earth, but I feel like I still did that even though I focused on pineapples. All forms discrimination are the functionally the same; when you take on one of them, you are simultaneously taking on all of them because you are not just fighting against sexism, racism, or homophobia specifically; you are fighting against the irrational foundation of hate that they are built on. Even when you take on something as trivial as the “discrimination that pineapple pizza lovers face,” you are attacking the fact that people get pleasure out of treating other people as inferior to boost their ego.
I am an avid supporter of pineapples and their contributions to pizza culture, but my opinion places me in a minority of pizza lovers. The online pizza delivery app Slice conducted a large-scale poll last year and found that a majority of users believe that pineapples don’t belong on pizza and think that they should go back to where they came from, the fruit kingdom. They feel that the sweet and savory cannot mix, that we can’t celebrate their differences and let them get along and work together. It stings a little bit. It stings when you eat some pineapple and jalapeno pizza, and everyone looks at you weird as if you are eating some ethnic food that they have never seen before while they munch down on their plain white cheese pizza. It stings when people assumptions about you like that just because you like pineapples on pizza, you also love Hawaiian pizza. I mean come on, no one likes Hawaiian pizza, and it’s not even Hawaiian. Just because there are some terrible pizzas with pineapples on them doesn’t mean that all pizzas with pineapples on them suck. It’s just a bad stereotype. This sounds an awful lot like some other discrimination that I just can’t put my finger on. Am I just going crazy? I probably am; I am writing an essay on how pineapple pizzas get “othered,” so I’m pretty far down the rabbit hole.
Why do people get pleasure out of discrimination, why does “othering” groups of people hold such happiness for people. Let’s dive into the root causes of one of humanity’s greatest shortcomings, a problem that intellectuals have been puzzled by for generations, a problem that is the root cause of many of the societal problems we have today in this unmistakably intellectual essay about pineapples and pizzas. Let’s take a quick trip to 1750. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had just published Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, and within this essay was a curious term, “amour proper.” Rousseau argued that as civilization developed, humanity’s corruption grew alongside it. He distinguished two types of “self-love,” “amour de soi” that was based on our interest in our health and survival and “amour proper.” The latter is based on our relationships with others and the recognition we receive from those around us rather than strictly based on ourselves and our biological needs like “amour de soi.” As our social relationships grew in number and importance with the advent of civilization, this form of self-love became more and more important to how we viewed ourselves and our worth. This idea of how society forced humans to derive their pleasure from others may explain why discrimination and “otherization” have such a grip on our world. Subjugation and exertion of dominance over others give people the feeling of absolute power; they derived a sort of pleasure from inciting pain in others because it created a power dynamic between them and the other people in which they held all the chips. The development of relationships between “inferior” and “superior” groups grew out of this basic principle; the “inferior” peoples’ appeasement of their masters generated self-love in their masters; they were recognized as the more powerful, intelligent, and dominant people by those under them, and that went to their heads. It is humanity’s derivation of pleasure out of relationships with others that Rousseau argues is the root cause of social inequality and the development of the abstract notion of an “inferior” other.
After writing this seemingly disconnected essay which was on the brink of being incomprehensible gibberish, I asked myself “Why did I decide to write this essay on a seemingly trivial thing like pineapples”? I could have written about how it feels to be immigrant me, or how it feels to be minority me. I could have written about racism or the “otherization” that I have had to face in my short time on this Earth, but I feel like I still did that even though I focused on pineapples. All forms discrimination are the functionally the same; when you take on one of them, you are simultaneously taking on all of them because you are not just fighting against sexism, racism, or homophobia specifically; you are fighting against the irrational foundation of hate that they are built on. Even when you take on something as trivial as the “discrimination that pineapple pizza lovers face,” you are attacking the fact that people get pleasure out of treating other people as inferior to boost their ego.