Before you ask how a delightful state like Hawaii could dream up such a divisive pizza topping, we’d like to point out that like the London Broil and Baked Alaska (origins: New York) and Chicken Kiev (origin: France) (via The Daily Meal), Hawaiian Pizza isn’t actually from Hawaii — it’s from Canada. And the inventor of that particular flavor was a man named Sam Panopoulos, reports Food Network Canada, who originally hailed from Greece, who discovered this now classic yet divisive combo, by throwing together different ingredients to see what would work and what wouldn’t.
Panopoulos, who passed away in 2017, told Food Network Canada: “Today you can go to a Chinese place and have a chicken salad, Thai place they give you something else. But in those days [the 1960s] there was no way you could mix flavors. When you told someone to try pineapple on their pizza they looked at you like, ‘Are you crazy?'”
In all fairness though, some people still think like that today, but in case you feel like an outlier on this issue, we’re here to tell you that you shouldn’t feel this way. Because almost 40 percent of folks around the world have told us that they don’t mind having pineapple on their pizza — which is probably plenty more than you probably expected.
