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3 hours ago
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Forget Greenland. A UK pizzeria, Lupa Pizza in Norwich, rendered itself the No 1 place on earth most deserving of hostile annexation this week when it announced a “taste tax” on one of its offerings.
In the past, wars have been provoked by a pig, cod, bird droppings, a bucket, someone’s ear and a pastry shop Promoted with the heft of the modern internet, Lupa’s reckless polarisation of the pizza may yet heave us into Ragnarök.
Despite retailing its other pizzas for about £11.80 a pop, such is the Lupa management’s antipathy to pineapple that requesting it as pizza topping now cops a £100 fee.
“I absolutely loathe pineapple on a pizza,” a co-owner, Francis Woolf, told the Norwich Evening News. “Yeah, for £100 you can have it,” explains their Deliveroo menu. “Order the champagne, too. Go on, you Monster!”
Well, the horror author Stephen King once warned that: “Monsters are real … they live inside us, and, sometimes, they win.” He was talking about me. I happen to love pineapple on pizza; my standard order is a medium Hawaiian and I devour every slice with a tomato-base smile and a tangy, hammy joy.
It is one thing to yuck my yum, Mr Woolf, but to insist I should be punished for it invites my cheesy ire. War is the recipe these pizza chefs have chosen; I say, let’s give them all they want.
I jest, if not about my fondness for the pineapple. But the intensity of reaction is the point. Whether pineapple belongs on pizza is a matter of taste – and, when it appears on the internet, it tastes like a very modern flavour of deliberate tribalism. Like cheese on a mince pie, the appropriate thickness of Vegemite or whether coriander/cilantro is of Satan, it’s in perennial online circulation as an inherently subjective, ever-provocative salvo from accounts that know: what enrages you engages you. These are known as “internet food fights” and, if you’ve never been online before, I’m sure you’ll find them really interesting.
The rest of us probably should, for as social cohesiveness continues to fracture, political divides widen and gender itself increasingly represents cultural polarisation, how the internet and the behaviour it inspires weaponise something as mundane and personal as a preference for or against Miracle Whip is something that bears closer scrutiny – especially in election years.
Unlike responsibility for a sovereign government, anyone can access a food debate – and do so with the confidence born of experience. Punters who may be reticent to advance an opinion on the Phillips curve could readily lambast the former UK Labour leader Ed Miliband’s awkward consumption of a bacon sandwich. Those who forget – or, dare I suggest, never knew – the function of a franking credit could authoritatively condemn Bill Shorten’s strange sideways take on sausage-eating.
Propagandists bet we won’t consider the man struggling with the bacon sandwich may be Jewish, that Shorten’s non-suggestive options with the sausage were quite limited, that no one will interrogate why there’s suddenly a discourse hating on Blake Lively’s hair.
And those who seek money or power by “flooding the zone” with shit are also deeply aware of how much we now define our internal identity and public personae around which flavour of shit we prefer. Individual taste is not just an accumulation of mental and physical associations that remind us of pleasure or repel us from what makes us frightened, angry or sick. It’s an outward projection of who we want to be, and how – and by whom – we wish to be seen.
Taste not only moulds communities into markets, it mobilises people into tribes and tribes against each other because, when someone’s preferences are dismissed, it can feel like a dismissal of who they are, not just what they like.
I don’t want to be vulnerable so I interrogated my pro-pineappleist rage and remembered: as a working-class kid with an oft-unemployed dad, the occasional “Hawaiian” pizza was the closest thing to Hawaii my parents could afford, its flavours a rare, exotic treat when we were mostly living on variations of minced meat. When attacked in the polarising and extreme language preferred by hordes of internet randos, the subject stirs old resentments towards classism, it reminds me of deprivation, it registers as an insult to my beloved family, as if our treats were lesser, our joys invalid.
Lupa Pizza is no doubt just out to find new customers, not insult my class background; I hardly begrudge them. They’re under no obligation to serve pineapple pizzas and I am under no obligation to buy them. Similarly, if Nickelback, boat shoes or Lladró figurines bring you joy, leave me to the KLF, Australian Modernism and my skinny jeans, unjudged.
Should we instead take the bait, engage division, form tribes, publish our most intimate preferences as purchasable data points and continue to pretend these stoushes are not trivial, the resulting discord will reveal: you don’t need to buy a freakin’ pizza to pay a tax on taste.
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Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
