夏威夷披萨其实诞生于加拿大，发明者是一位希腊移民

The most divisive pizza in the world is not from Hawaii, and it is not from Italy either. Hawaiian pizza, the one with ham and pineapple, was born in 1962 in Chatham, a small city in Ontario, Canada, in the kitchen of a Greek immigrant.

His name was Sotirios "Sam" Panopoulos. Born in 1934 in Vourvoura, Greece, he left for Canada at 20, in 1954, and on the way stopped in Naples, where he tasted pizza for the first time. He landed in Halifax, worked in the mines of northern Ontario and, in 1962, opened the Satellite Restaurant in Chatham with his brothers. Like many Greek-owned diners of the time, it served all-day breakfast, burgers and fries, and Americanized Chinese dishes. Pizza was still a novelty in Canada.

The inspiration came from those Chinese dishes, which mixed sweet and sour flavors. Panopoulos opened a can of pineapple and put the fruit on a pizza with ham. "We just put it on, just for the fun of it, see how it was going to taste," he told the BBC in 2017. "We were young in the business and we were doing a lot of experiments." At first, customers thought he was crazy. "A couple of months later, they're going crazy about it. So we put it on the menu."

The name has nothing to do with the islands either: "Hawaiian" was the brand on the can of pineapple. Panopoulos never patented or trademarked the recipe. Years later he summed it up in a radio interview with the CBC: for him, it was "just another piece of bread cooking in the oven." From that small restaurant, the combination spread across Canada and then the world.

So did the fight. In February 2017, Iceland's president, Guðni Th. Jóhannesson, told high school students in Akureyri that he was "fundamentally opposed" to pineapple on pizza and would ban it if he could. The comment went viral, and days later he published a statement explaining that he did not have that power, and was glad he did not. His recommendation for pizza: "I recommend seafood." Panopoulos, who followed the debate with good humor, died a few months later, in June 2017, at 82.

The Satellite Restaurant is still open on King Street West, in Chatham, and the Hawaiian pizza is still on the menu. Food history is full of twists like this: the tomato in the sauce was once sold in the United States as medicine, in the form of tomato pills.

Sources: The Canadian Encyclopedia; BBC News (2017); Satellite Restaurant; The Guardian (2017); CBC Radio (As It Happens); CBS News. Cover: Hawaiian pizza by Elsie Hui, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.