You can talk about religion, guns, and the Mueller Report all you want. The most contested topic in America in 2019 is the pineapple pizza. Or rather, if it is actually pizza. I mean, it's got fruit on it. But then again, every pizza has fruit on it right? And Canadian Bacon - AKA - ham. Why don't they just call it ham? For whatever reason, about two-thirds of all pizza lovers have a big problem with what the world refers to as "Hawaiian Pizza."

Fun fact, it's not Hawaiian. It's Canadian. Apparently, the all-denim-wearing (probably) Canadian chef that created this worldly mess of a dish is named Sam Panopoulos. He willed this fruity pork-pie into being back in 1962, allegedly... but the story goes deeper than that.

You see, Sam was, at some point, a food worker in a Chinese type restaurant. So he was accustomed to mixing the sweet and savory like the tastes of Asia typically do. But was he really the first?

If you go back to the mid-1950's, Germany's own 'Julia Child' TV chef, Carl Hahn was perhaps the first to put pineapple and ham together with cheese on bread. That doesn't make it a pizza more than toast, but the building blocks are there.

Does adding a tomato sauce to an existing dish really make it a new dish? I mean, if the only difference between ice cream and a Sundae is the cherry, I suppose these two pineapple abominations are different.

Skip forward about forty years. It's the turn of the century, and pineapple pizza had gone mainstream. It was everywhere. I don't think there was a single middle-class soccer mom that didn't add a Hawaiian pie to the pizza order in homes across America. My mother did, and she didn't even like it all that much... but as nobody else would eat it, it was a pizza she knew she could have leftovers with. But is it actually a pizza?

I think, given the popularity of some pie-shop menus, we can legitimately call "Hawaiian Pizza" a pizza. After all, you can toss chopped beef and pulled pork on pizza dough and drizzle it with BBQ sauce, but nobody is saying "Yeah, we're having BBQ." They'll say they're eating pizza. Samesies for Buffalo chicken pizza. You can be halfway through a slice of that and have the audacity to state you're eating wings...

If I haven't wasted enough of your time, and believe me, I probably have, I'll leave you with this. The taco is another universal food vessel. You can stuff anything into a taco shell, and it'll be delicious. Well, almost anything... I've found that brownies are pretty awful in a corn shell, but almost anything else works. It all works the same way. You wouldn't chow-down on a fish taco and tell someone you're eating fish... or shrimp... chicken, turkey, tofu, etc... You'd tell them you were eating tacos.

Even though pineapple pizza is a carnal sin in the eyes of the food gods and your father (probably)... Eat up. Pizza is dough, and anything topped on it is still pizza... Unless you're from Chicago. That's not pizza. That's just tomato sauce pie, and probably the worst way to eat anything that should otherwise be 'on' a pizza.

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