The Man Who Invented The Hawaiian Pizza Has Died Aged 83

By : On : 10 Jun 2017 16:26
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The man who invented the controversial Hawaiian pizza has died aged 83 leaving a fruity and divisive legacy. 

Sam Panopoulos, a Greek migrant, was the man who in 1962 while running a restaurant in Canada with his brothers had the vision to put pineapple on pizza.

Unfortunately like many visionaries, his reach exceeded his grasp and Sam created an unholy fusion of fruit, ham and cheese that’s divided gourmets across the world for over half a century.

Mr Panopoulos explained how the Hawaiian was born:

We just put it on, just for the fun of it, see how it was going to taste, We were young in the business and we were doing a lot of experiments.

The Hawaiian pizza was brought to life through one of these wretched experiments. Apparently the brothers used to serve Chinese food, as well as pizza, and were inspired by sweet and sour flavours to mix sweet and savoury in a hellish and dare I say heretical fusion.

Once the pizza had risen, Frankenstein’s monster style, from the oven Mr Panopoulos named it The Hawaiian after the brand of pineapple they’d used.

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Surprisingly though the pizza with a smash hit and Mr Panopoulos told the BBC people were ‘going crazy about it’ so they decided to add it to their menu permanently.

From there the pizza spread across the globe igniting international debate. In fact, only last year the president of Iceland, Guðni Thorlacius Jóhannesson got into a spat with his own citizens after saying he would ban pineapple pizza if he could.

Meanwhile the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has defended his nation’s most infamous export saying:

I have a pineapple. I have a pizza. And I stand behind this delicious Southwestern Ontario creation.

Jokes aside, Mr Panopoulos was always very proud of his creation saying he was ‘glad’ he came up with something people like to eat.

His family paid tribute to Mr Panopoulos calling him ‘an unforgettable personality’ who was well respected for ‘providing strong and dependable advice, and for his exceedingly generous nature’.

RIP Sam, you leave behind a divisive legacy!