There is nothing quite like pizza. The variety is endless, the experience is
magical, the taste is delicious, and they can be found in almost every
single country on Earth, with any number of local variations. Now, we
all know the controversy that surrounds certain toppings, and quite frankly, I am
squarely on the side of those who believe that pineapple does not belong on a
pizza. I mean, you don't see me going around adding chicken wings to
a fruit salad. But I digress. I mean, you're welcome to come
and tell me that I'm wrong over on Twitter at Nick Charlie Key or at
Food History Pod. I'll happily debate this with you, but it would take
something special to get me to change my mind. Anyway, back to the
matter at hand, pizza's. Now, I've been lucky enough to have tried
authentic Italian pizza in almost every Italian city that I visited, and they really
do live up to the hype, which makes today's story all the sadder when
we find out that, from their humble Italian origins, fifty thousand of these
delicious delicacies were once condemned to a mass burial in Michigan and even US pineapple
haters can put aside our differences in the face of this culinary tragedy. But
for now, let's see what possibly could have led to this most awful of
outcomes. Welcome to the fantastic history of food. Strange but true stories from
history that in some way involve food. I'm your host, Nick Charlie Key.
When you start digging into the history of pizza, it can take you
way back in time, almost seven thousand years in fact, some French and
Italian archaeologists have discovered flatbreads similar in function to pizzas from that time period on
the Italian island of Sardinia. But this island is not the only place in
which history records foods similar to pizza having been made. People have been topping
flatbreads with herbs, spices, and other toppings all throughout ancient history, and
possibly one of the coolest and definitely the most badass ancient recipe for pizza comes
to us from Persia. Now, I know you may be picturing someone in
a little tavern kneading the dough and prepping it for cooking in a big fireplace,
but I'm afraid to tell you you couldn't be more wrong. This Persian
pizza was cooked by none other than the Persian soldiers fighting for Emperor Darius the
Great on the front lines of his European and Asian conquests. And to make
it even more hardcore, these soldiers would cook these flatbreads right on top of
their metal shields. They would prepare the dough, top it with cheese and
dates, two ingredients readily in supply in a soldier's rations, and once it
was ready for cooking, they would light a fire. When the coals were
hot enough, spread them out evenly across the ground, placed the uncooked flatbread
on top of their metal shield, and then lay it down across the coals
to cook like some sort of rock and roll frying pan. The Greeks would
also go on to create their own version of this topped flatbread, called placus,
by adding herbs, onions, cheese and garlic, and what is probably
the closest iteration we have to what we know today. As for Katia,
there even mentions of a pizza like food in Virgil's poem that Enid, written
around nineteen BC. If you look hard enough, there are basic examples of
precursor dishes in almost every ancient society, from Roman soldiers adding cheese and olive
oil to matsa two thousand years ago to a Chinese wheat flower street food flattened
into a disc and known as bing. India had the perata, Southeast Asia
had the narn and the roti, pitta bread and grease, and lapincha in
the Balkans, flumcucan in the French Alsas regions, and even earlier forms of
the modern day kiche. But the first food to actually be called the pizza
was in sixteenth century Naples. The city had originally been founded around six hundred
BC as a Greek settlement, but along the way would change hands between them
the Spanish and the Italians at varying times throughout the ages. By the seventeen
hundreds it had developed into a bustling waterfront city with a thriving trade sector.
But as with all major cities, there will unfortunately always be a large number
of poor workers doing the menial day to day jobs that are needed in a
city of that size, and Naples was no different. And the closer you
got to the bay itself, the more crowded the population became. So much
so that many people spent most of their time outside in the streets and only
went into their homes to find a place to sleep for the night. This
meant that street food stalls became the de facto way to consume your meals,
and these meals also needed to be inexpensive, able to be eaten quickly and
on the move, and most importantly, without the luxury of cutlery. This
also just happens to be the perfect description of a pizza. It was originally
a flatbread with a texture more closely aligned to a flaky pie crust than the
modern version of pizza we know, and while it was mainly only consumed by
the lower and working classes, it began to grow into more mainstream popularity when
the Spanish brought back the tomato from the Americas. Naples and Sicily were at
this point a part of the Spanish Empire, and so they were one of
the first to take hold of these new world treasures as they arrived back into
Europe. Fast forward a few hundred years and we see an account from famed
author Alexander Dumar, who tells the origin story of one of the world's most
famous pizzas on the eleventh of June eighteen eighty nine, a pizza maker from
the city of Naples known as Raffaeli Esposito created a pizza in honor of the
Queen of Italy. Now he wanted it to be somewhat patriotic, and so
he decided to recreate the colors of the Italian flag in the toppings of his
pizza. This was simple enough, the tomato base for the red, balls
of mozzarella for the white, and a liberal array of basil leaves for the
green. The only thing left to do was to name the pizza, and
seeing as it was in honor of the Queen, it made sense to name
it after her, Queen Margherita. Even with the Queen's blessing, it still
took almost another fifty years before pizza began to spread out from its southern Italian
roots. Much of this outward expansion was thanks to a large proportion of Neapolitan
Italians moving to America for factory work and taking their pizza making traditions along with
them. The traditions and evolution of pizza have grown to almost mythical proportions since
then. A council was founded in Naples designating a particular method and a strict
set of rules for pizza making. For it to be called an authentic Neapolitan
style pizza, it must be needed by hand only, no rolling pins or
mechanical intervention. It must be no wider than thirty five centimeters in diameter,
and it must not be thicker than one third of a centimeter in the middle.
It must only be cooked in a special domed brick oven and heated only
by a wood fire. There are even some pizzerias in Naples that have an
even stricter standard by which they are allowed to make their pizzas. For them
only the use of San Marzano tomatoes grown on the slopes of Mount Forsuvius is
allowed for their tomato base, and when drizzling the olive oil on top,
it must be done in a clockwise direction only. As its popularity continued to
grow into other countries around the world, pizza reas began experimenting with different toppings,
and it was in nineteen sixty two that the most fateful of all pizza
related innovations was first experimented with a restaurateur by the name of sam Panopolis from
the satellite restaurant in chattam Ontario is credited as being the first person to put
pineapple chunks on a pizza. And you know, from a Canadian usually such
a peace loving people, this really does come across as an unprecedented act of
aggression. But the damage has been done and all we can do is move
on. In all seriousness, even this travesty is not the darkest day in
pizza history. No, that unfortunate time belongs to the state of Michigan in
the year nineteen seventy three. One of today's sponsors is Athletic Greens. So
what is Athletic Greens. Well, with one delicious scoop of Athletic Greens,
you're absorbing seventy five high quality vitamins, minerals, whole food sourced superfoods,
probiotics and adaptogens to help you start your day right. This special blend of
ingredients supports your gut health, your nervous system, your immune system, your
energy, your recovery, your focus and aging. And best of all,
it's lifestyle friendly. So whether you follow aquito, paleo, vegan, dairy
free or gluten free diet, Athletic Greens fits into all of them. It
costs less than three dollars a day, and for every purchase, Athletic Greens
donates to organizations helping to get nutritious food to kids in need, including No
Kid Hungry in the US. In twenty twenty alone, Athletic Greens donated over
one point two million meals to kids. Right now, it's time to reclaim
your health and arm your immune system with a convelient daily nutrition. It's just
one scoop in a cup of water every day, that's it. No need
for a million different pearls and supplements to look out for your health. To
make it easy, Athletic Greens is going to give you a free one year
supply of immune supporting Vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase.
All you have to do is visit Athletic Greens dot com slash emerging again
that's Athletic Greens dot com slash E M E R G I n G to
take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional Insurance. Yes
present, Yes hi there, I'm your host fand are you ready for a
second season of Just Cheesy The Podcast? Do you want to learn a little
bit about cheese history? Do you want to find out about the latest cheese
holidays. Yeah, do you want to hear about some cheese news? Why
is cheddar the most dangerous of all the cheeses? Wow? Because it's very
sure. Join us for just cheesing the podcast. It was January of that
year and over in Ohio, employees at the United Canning Company we're doing a
routine inspection of their stock when they began to notice that a large number of
their canned mushrooms had begun to swell. Now, I'm sure all of us
know through our own experiences that swollen cans of anything is never a good sign,
and once these particular ones were sent for testing, it soon revealed that
these mushrooms were full of a particularly nasty bacteria known as Clostridium bochulinum, which,
if ingested, causes all your muscles to seize up, stop working,
low blood pressure, and in extreme cases, even death. The Food and
Drug Administration was alerted and there immediately pulled any of the remaining cans off the
shelves in the stores, but then had the hard task of trying to follow
the supply chain for the rest of these products. A vast number of pre
prepared food companies used the mushrooms from United Canning, including most notably for this
story, a man named Mario Fabrini, the owner of Papa Fabrini's Frozen Pizzas
now. Fabrini himself was an immigrant to the United States and was one of
the people I mentioned earlier who had brought pizza culture with him to his new
home. He and his family had fled Italy during World War Two to escape
fascism and for the promise of a better life. Once he arrived in the
US, he decided to take his family's pizza recipe and adapt it for American
palettes. Part of this decision was the inclusion of mushrooms onto his pizza.
When he got a call from the FDA about the problem with United Canning's mushrooms,
he feared the worst. He immediately stopped his shipments and he sent samples
of his mushroom pizzas for testing. Slices of his pizza were given to some
mice in the FDA lab who ate the pizza with gusto and impromptly fell down
dead. Fabrini immediately recalled his pizzas from local restaurants and grocery stores, even
driving to some himself to collect them, but it seems a few may have
slipped through the net, as seventeen individuals reported falling ill after eating his pizzas.
There is some speculation, however, that those seventeen cases were all fabricated
by his biggest competitor as a method to discredit him. But Fabrini was a
much loved member of his community, and they rallied around him in his biggest
time of need. His neighbors offered to put up cash for him as bankruptcy
loomed, and the local priest led prayers for him at the Sunday church meeting.
For Fabrini, there was only one option left to him. He would
hold a funeral for all fifty thousand of his Belo pizzas. So on the
fifth of March nineteen seventy three, dozens of people headed out to a farm
in Ossenique, Michigan, to witness the burial of tens of thousands of frozen,
family sized mushroom pizzas. Even the Governor of Michigan was in attendance and
gave a short speech about having courage in the face of tragedy. Now there's
no record of this whatsoever, but I like to imagine that as he stopped
speaking, a bagpipe began playing, as soldiers raised their rifles and fired off
at twenty one gun salute. As the bulldozers closed in an enormous eighteen foot
deep hole had been dug the day before, and the bulldozers made light work
of pushing the towering mountains of pizza into the hole. The owner of the
farm, clearly oblivious to the long term hazards of plastic, said, from
next fall onwards there will be nothing left but cellophane. And as the bulldozers
finished their job filling in the hole with dirt, Mario Fabrini walked up solemnly
to the mound to pay his last respects. He had two flowers in his
hands, which he laid atop the dirt, a red cladioli flower to represent
the red of his tomato bases, and a white carnation to represent the white
of his mozzarella cheese. Then he turned to the crowd and announced that he
had catered pizzas for all of them right there and then, and these ones,
presumably free of any deadly bacteria. In an even more tragic twist in
this tale, just a few weeks later it was discovered that, unknown to
him, his pizzas had actually been safe to eat all along. He had
not received any of the tainted batch of mushrooms to begin with, and the
mice that had died in the FDA lab had apparently died of some other different
mouse related illness. According to their autopsies. Fabrini would take a massive hit
financially and would then lose even more money in the years following as he would
have to change his production line as people last faith in ushrooms. But in
the end his business would grow back to its former glory, partly thanks to
a court victory that Fbrini one after suing the United Canning Company for damages to
the tune of a million dollars. Maybe those strict Neapolitan pizzerias are right,
because, if anything, this tale speaks to the benefits of only using fresh
ingredients where possible in all of our cooking. Oh and of course no pineapples.
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Fantastic History of Food.
If you'd like to get in touch, you can find us on Twitter at
Food History Pod. If you enjoyed this episode, I'd really appreciate you taking
a moment to rate the show on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on,
and if you can leave a review as well. I also have a
Patreon account where you can support the show and get access to exclusive content,
bonus episodes, and even the chance to choose the topic for an upcoming episode.
But all of this is only for our Patreon subscribers. Everyone who donates
or subscribes will also get a personal shout out from me on an upcoming episode.
Check in our website where you can find transcripts, show notes, and
references for each and every episode at food History podcast dot com.