Last week, the president of Iceland, Guðni Th. Jóhannesson, publicly denounced the use of pineapple as a pizza topping, going so far as to say that if he could pass laws on his own, he would ban the topping’s recreational use altogether.
Guðni shared his controversial comments during a visit to a high school in Akureyi, a town in North Iceland, according to Iceland Magazine. The president, a former history professor, talked with students and teachers about the school’s history and took questions from the room.
That’s when someone—possibly a troublemaking student looking to nonchalantly push the anti-pineapple agenda—asked Guðni to chime in on the matter, to which Guðni said he was “fundamentally opposed” to putting pineapple on pizza.
While Guðni’s harmful rhetoric, which has the potential to rock his 97 percent approval ratings, appeared to purposely widen the rift between the two factions of pizza lovers, Guðni failed to mention that his own tastes in pizza are those of garbage people.
Yes, the president who expertly dogged on pineapple pizza toppings as if an authority on the matter is a lover of the once disgusting, still disgusting Domino’s Pizza. In August, less than a month after his inauguration, Iceland’s president was seen picking up a pizza from Domino’s during the pizza corporation’s “Mega Week,” some sort of promotion used to trick innocent people into overeating mass-produced pizza slop.
Furthermore, an article for Iceland Review Online, a website for the country’s oldest English-language magazine, purports that Icelanders are fascinated with pineapple, and even claims that it is a “favorite pizza topping,” and is used on sandwiches and salads (for the record, the piece was published in 2009 but updated in 2014). If the president is such the history aficionado, why is he quick to sever the country’s ties to the tropical fruit?
Clearly, President Guðni does not fully understand the pizza communities of Iceland—perhaps the president should reconsider his personal pizza tastes the next time he decides to weigh in on such a politically-charged topic.
Update 3:00pm CT, Feb. 21: President Guðni released a statement on Facebook earlier today regarding his “pizza-controversy,” in which he backtracked on his stance and said even he likes pineapple himself.
“I like pineapples, just not on pizza. I do not have the power to make laws which forbid people to put pineapples on their pizza. I am glad that I do not hold such power. Presidents should not have unlimited power,” Guðni wrote.
However, Guðni closed his statement with another controversial proposal: the pro-pizza community should top pizzas with seafood, instead.
The country’s fishing industry, which has historically heavily supported their economy, still provides 40 percent of Iceland’s exports and employs five percent of the workforce. And in August, Guðni spoke at Iceland’s national fish and seafood festival Great Fish Day, less than a week after his inauguration. Guðni sudden support of crustaceans and mollusks on pizza sounds fishy, to say the least.
