TIL a Canadian from Greece took an American version of an Italian dish and added tropical fruit to it and called it a Hawaiian pizza.

It's kinda crazy that it took the combined culinary efforts of at least 4 nations to create something genius that would piss off all of those nations.

Also, pineapple on pizza is fucking delicious, and I will fight over that personal opinion being as valid as it sucking :)

Pepperoni, bacon, pineapple, and jalapeño. The ultimate combination of sweet, spicy, salty, and savory.
- You have been awarded the key to the city of Halifax.
- Word, though I have to go very light on the peppers nowadays lol
- Replace the bacon with ham slices and you've got my favourite pizza
- In the states they never add Jalapenos because of all the WASPS who say things like "this food has too much flavor" so I thought I hated Hawaiian pizza, def will try with Jalapeno.
- This minus the pepperoni is my favorite pizza
Whats even crazier is the ethnobotanical path to GET those ingredients together.

Tomatoes had to be brought from south america. Bred to grow at lower altitudes. Peasants had to be persuaded to eat them (they were formally animal feed because they were from the nightshade family and peasants didn't trust the fruit not to be poisonous since the leaves are) and then enough time (100 years) had to pass for them to develop cuisine around them.
In Greece, eating feta cheese with watermelon(or melon) is somewhat common. You combine the sweetness of the watermelon with the saltiness of feta. And both things are cold.
- In Italy, prosciutto with melon is pretty common. Sweet and savory as a combination is pretty common. See also: sharp cheddar on apple pie.
- Similar to a fruit bowl with cottage cheese.
- Yup, and it's yummy as hell.
  
  Here in the south, and maybe elsewhere, we sometimes add a nice hunk of extra sharp cheddar on top of our apple pie for the same reason. Heck, any number of fruit plates will be served with cheeses, and vice versa.
  
  Once you get into the sweet, salt, fat, acid combo, it really doesn't matter what you use to get them.
  
  To quote a great American show, "pork chops and applesauce". "Hawaiian" pizza is just a different version of the same basic idea
- That's common in California, too. Watermelon, feta and a little bit of lime juice is a frequent summer salad.
Pizza is a very fatty, often greasy food, and acidic taste balances out greasiness in the mouth
- Good thing tomatoes are acidic then
Pineapple, Canadian bacon, pepperoni, red onion, and balsamic drizzle. My recent stroke of genius from the local unlimited topping pizza place.
- Try red bell pepper with balsamic. I love the combination.
It really depends on the quality of the pineapple to me. Sometimes it is dry and it sucks. Sometimes it is kinda melted, which gives a sweet to the pizza without making the texture weird.
Agreed. It's amazing. I always spring for pineapple on pizza

And some countries put canned corn on pizza and call it “American style” because Americans love corn.

I was once in a Filipino grocery in L.A. and they had corn and cheese ice cream. I don't mean they had corn ice cream and they had cheese ice cream, I mean they had an ice cream flavor called "corn and cheese."
- Filipino here, grew up with the stuff and never realized how weird it could be perceived as until now. It's more like a cheesy vanilla flavor with bits of corn.
  
  We also have a creamy vanilla sort of popsicle with red mung beans in it that I suspect we got from the Chinese.
- Me loading my .45 1911
  
  "Shame"
- I’d try it

In Japan, there's Vermont curry, which has a maple-syrup-y taste.

Vermont doesn't have a state curry.

Yup. You can get it in the USA at Asian grocery stores, and even in some American stores located in areas with large Asian populations. And it’s fucking delicious.
- I'm more of a fan of the Japanese Golden curry, but that Vermont curry was way better than I expected.
Omg, yuck. I love curry, but this is insanity.
- Just fyi, it tastes nothing like maple syrup.
  
  I felt the same way when I heard about it. Made it one night, turns out it is just a very slightly sweeter curry than the normal katsu curry base.
- I'm with you. I grew up eating spicy curry so anything different from that is a weird

AAAAND it is inspired by north American Chinese food.

Inspired in part by his experience preparing Chinese dishes which commonly mix sweet and savory flavours,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_pizza

And then the Hawaiians replaced the ham with spam.

Honesty that'd probably be better. Ham is so bland on pizza; it can't compete with the sauce. I always do pineapple and pepperoni. The spice from the pepperoni cuts through the sweetness really nicely.
- That's why you need some nice smoked ham or honey roast or similar....agree though, most places just use most bland crap they can find cheap
- Nah, swap the ham for some bacon. It can stand up to the sauce and the pineapple. And still technically ham.
I admit that I haven’t tried the hawaiian pizza at every joint around here, but the ones I have tried or noticed still use ham.

It gets even messier.

Modern tomato sauce used in pizza is a variation of the sauce in southern Italy. People were cultivating tomatoes there after they were introduced by Spain, that controlled both that region and the North American lands formerly controlled by the Aztec city-States (nowadays by Mexico).

Where are tomatoes from? South America. Yup. The lands are today Peru's and/or Ecuador's. Likely domesticated way before Cuzco/Inca expanded over the region. In the meantime, the pineapples being put over the pizza are from another region, the Paraná basin (currently controlled by Brazil and Paraguay).

Then you got the dough. Wheat was domesticated somewhere in the Fertile Crescent; I think that the lands currently controlled by Iraq should be a safe bet. In special, Eastern Rome (aka Byzantium) used to control Naples too, spreading πίτα/pita (a type of flat bread) again into the region. (I say "again" because the Aeneid already talks about pizza, in Republican times.)

Cows (for the cheese) were domesticated a bit further to the west, probably what's today controlled by Syria... well, at least one of the times, because you can almost hear haunting zebu moos from what's controlled now by Pakistan. (I believe that most domestic breeds should be a cross between both, with varied amounts of zebu x taurus. And perhaps a third stock from the Maghreb.)

Just think, if you open your mind and let other cultures be your inspiration, you too could invent something as reviled and divisive as Hawaiian pizza.

Multiculturalism was a mistake.

Finally

That being said, I do enjoy it.

Whats a Canadian from Greece? Was the guy Greek living in Canada? Doesn’t that just make him Greek? Or was it a person born in Canada with Greek ancestry? That would not make him from Greece.

He was born in Greece and became a Canadian citizen. That made him a Canadian from Greece.
- Now, were I a smarter man, I would have realized that. Thanks for the correction.

Pizza is American. They perfected it and deserves the full credit. Italians can cry with their hands.

Describing American pizza and Italian pizza as being the same thing is imperialism
Aeneas and his chiefs, with fair Iulus, under spreading boughs of one great tree made resting-place, and set the banquet on. Thin loaves of altar-bread along the sward to bear their meats were laid (such was the will of Jove), and wilding fruits rose heaping high, with Ceres' gift below. Soon, all things else devoured, their hunger turned to taste the scanty bread, which they attacked with tooth and nail audacious, and consumed both round and square of that predestined leaven. “Look, how we eat our tables even!” cried Iulus, in a jest.

This is from a translation of the Aeneid, published in 19 BCE.

and this is from Pompeii, buried in 79 CE.

Pizza is at the very least Roman, if not older. (Potentially Greek.)

And before someone mentions tomatoes, pizza bianca is a thing.
- Admittedly it doesn't take much creative thinking to come up with the idea of "bread with stuff on it".
  
  It'd be pretty different from what we think of as pizza today though with no tomatoes or mozzarella.

I go to Italy often just to eat real Italian food. I understand that for Italians, the hawainana pizza is an aberration, like many other things if not cooked as they traditionally do. And I respect it, because it's a key part of their culture. Still, I have a right to eat and like whatever I want, so I also expect respect on that sense. Some people will do this and some others won't. I think it's a personal choice to decide respecting others opinions.

Traditional schmaditional. They never had tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, corn or a bunch of other things until Meso-America was ransacked.
- Discovering that tomatoes were new world fruit really torpedoed any chance of me respecting Italian traditions
They don't have to serve you what you want if it's not on the menu, they can try to accommodate if they really want but that's about it.

But if you don't have the ingredients they cannot really do that can they.
They make pizza dulce with Nutella, so I can get my pizza with pineapple

This is why I can never hate on hawaiian pizza. It is a true-born Canadian pizza, birthed from these frozen wastes.

A fruit native to Brazil. We call it "pizza hawaii" in the Netherlands and it's tasty. Ananas, ham and cheese, perfection I say, pizza puritan snobs be damned.

I'm not too sure if pineapples are native from the lands currently controlled by Brazil, Paraguay, or both. The Amerindians farmed them quite a bit, so they spread even to to a chunk of North America; and the native range of a relative hints me that the genus originated further west.

That's just a guess though - the point is that nobody knows for sure.
I personally cannot stand pineapple on my pizza (despite wanting to like it). And really do not care what other people put on their food.
pineapples are farmed a lot in Hawaii, though.
- Nowadays the main pineapple fields on Maui are used to make liquor
  
  https://mauipineappletour.com/haliimaile-distillery-tour/
I feel one day people will learn to appreciate Brazilian pizza. We're not in that time yet though.

I'm glad everything about this man is written in the past tense. One of the worst creations ever.

One of the worst creations ever.

Are you talking about the sadly deceased genius, or the globally popular creation of his?
Forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing

https://giphy.com/gifs/nDbpk7leGbu12

Hey, I'm with you. I think it's awful and that the people who enjoy it should be taken out back and shot.

But I just don't have the energy to take my wife out back and shoot her.
- Imagine getting so worked up over what makes someone else happy.