So this is a game-
Hah, you kinda had to know I was going to use this lens.
Anyway, ‘does pineapple belong on a pizza’ is a game and it’s a game where we all pretend to care about things that are purely hypothetical and don’t actually have all that much harm involved in their exploration. It’s what we call paidic play, where you’re presenting people with a reasonably unstructured set of choices, and they then choose their own team, their own positions and even psend the time discussing or defining the rules.
Naturally, there is nothing so low-stakes as whether or not a foodstuff ‘belongs’ in a particular other type of foodstuff, especially something fusional like American-style pizza (trust me, I have Italian friends and boy do they have low views on places like Dominos). Yet still, we get worked up about it and behave as if it is in fact, very very important, even though we know it’s not.
Bernard Suits’ The Grasshopper refers to games as the willing struggle against unnecessary obstacles, and that is the pineapple pizza, or sandwich integrity game. Despite this, though, despite the fact it is a game, it is a game which we still enjoy and participate in because it teaches us about one another, it informs us about what people are and aren’t willing to do, and it even gives us ways to manipulate and annoy one another. Seriously, how odd is it that people will return to this argument as if it means anything at all?
Me, personally, I don’t like it, and I’m unhappy when I find it on my pizza. But that’s why I don’t order it and that’s okay.