Pinapple On Pizza

How the irrational rules we create reveal the limitations of the human brain

Unfortunately, members only link and I’m not going to pay 3x/year for a function I almost never use.

What, aside from pasta noodles, could be more quintessentially Italian than pizza? We all know the basic formulation: a thin base of wheat dough, a smearing of tomato sauce, cheese on top of that, and then a few choice morsels scattered across the cheese: perhaps ham, olives, or thin slices of sausage. A great many people therefore insist that putting pineapple on a pizza is sacrilege, an offense against gastronomy and a sure sign the offender lacks any understanding of authenticity.
And
Which is hilarious, because pizza itself is a recent invention and in no way authentically “Italian” at all. The tomato base is only possible because tomatoes came from the New World during the great Age of Discovery when wooden ships explored the globe and brought back amazing things like saffron, potatoes, and tomatoes. As for the other supposedly “authentic” Italian dishes, we need only remember that pasta noodles arose because travelers like Marco Polo brought back tales of the rice noodles found in Asia. Lacking rice, Europeans used what they had available (wheat) and so by this roundabout route we eventually get Spaghetti a la Bolognese, the primary ingredients of which (noodles and tomatoes) aren’t Italian at all. The same goes for that other supposedly quintessential Italian dish, rissoto. Rice, like the concept of noodles, came from Asia. And the saffron with which many rissotos are enhanced (along with Spanish pallella) comes likewise from the East.

Snip - next, a point Ghost Flea keeps bringing up

Alas, we will not do so for our brains are not evolved to perform thinking tasks. In fact, the situation is quite the opposite because during 99% of our evolutionary history calories were scarce and uncertain and so our behavioral repertoire is adapted to these conditions. Any attempt at thinking requires the utilization of too many calories, and for nearly all of our past such calories were needed to power our muscles instead. Thus we will continue to blindly obey “rules” because we imagine them to be immutable rather than transient and arbitrary and because we imagine they will “keep us safe” despite all too often there being clear evidence to the contrary.

It turns out that when we stop to look at the origins of many of our supposed “rules” we find not reason and order but arbitrary invention and unsupported assertion. Speakers of English, like speakers of all languages, naturally worry about comprehensibility. Language exists primarily to convey information and only secondarily as a means to send signals regarding one’s place in society. Getting these priorities the wrong way around leads to well-meaning but utterly moronic actions like inventing and then promoting Eubonics or pretending that ghetto slang is “equally valid” compared to Standard English. Given that much of our modern-day communication prior to the invention of the Internet and its endless short-form content used to be via the written word, it’s natural therefore that we’d be concerned about spelling.

Alas, spelling has always been, and always will be, in flux. Indeed, much contemporary English spelling is the result of a ludicrous imposition made by a few dunderheads whose enthusiasm for the newly rediscovered Classical Greek texts in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries led them to impose Greek conventions on the fundamentally Germanic language we know as English. This is why, for example, we see ph replace f in certain words (like phonetic). An obsession with Greek and Latin also led to the tiresome claim that one should not split infinitives in English despite the fact in English the infinitive is generally formed by means of a conjunction of a preposition (to) and a verb (run). In Greek and Latin, as with many of the languages that evolved from Latin (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian), the infinitive is a single unit (courir, derived from the Latin curr). Thus we have supposed “purists” claiming that the famous opening voiceover in the childrens’ TV series Star Trek is “wrong” and one should not ever try “to boldly go” anywhere. In reality, English infinitives are frequently split in order for the sentence either to flow more easily or for its meaning to be made more clear.

There’s obviously more, and some his points fall flat, but pineapple on pizza wars forever.