(Roughly) Daily

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 [see here]. 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…

A thorough examination of how pineapple broke the internet– Will Coldwell (@will_coldwell) explains why Hawaiian pizza is the polarizing issue of our times.

* Bill Murray

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As we keep it simple, we might recall that it was on the date in 1985 that the McDonald’s #1 Store Museum opened in Des Plaines, Illinois. A replica of the former McDonald’s restaurant there, opened by Ray Kroc in April 1955, the company usually refers to it as The Original McDonald’s, although it is not the first McDonald’s restaurant but the ninth: the first was opened by Richard and Maurice McDonald in San Bernardino, California in 1940, and the oldest McDonald’s still in operation is the third one built, in Downey, California, which opened in 1953.

Still, the Des Plaines restaurant marked the beginning of future CEO Kroc’s involvement with the firm. It was the first opened under the aegis of his franchising company McDonald’s Systems, Inc., which became McDonald’s Corporation after Kroc purchased the McDonald brothers’ stake in the firm.

But lest the corporation seem sentimental, the museum was completely demolished as of January 2019.  A new, modern McDonald’s was built across the street– at which there are a half-dozen glass-enclosed exhibits arrayed around the tables. These include red and white tiles from the original restaurant, and string ties worn by employees from the 1950s to the early 1970s.

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