37 - Michigan Held A Funeral For 30 000 Pizzas

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.

Which makes todays story all the sadder, when we find out that from their humble italian origins, 30 000 of these delicious delicacies were once condemned to mass burial in Michigan.

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Thank you to Athletic Greens for being a sponsor for this episode.

To make it easy, Athletic Greens will give you a FREE 1 year supply of immune-supporting Vitamin D AND 5 FREE travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit www.athleticgreens.com/EMERGING to take ownership of your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance!

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Thank you also to Just Cheesy Podcast for being a sponsor of this episode.

A show all about the cheese. What's not to love? You can find them here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-cheesy-the-podcast/id1594272993

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Find transcripts and sources on the website: www.foodhistorypodcast.com

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References:

https://www.history.com/news/a-slice-of-history-pizza-through-the-ages#:~:text=Pizza%20has%20a%20long%20history,to%20the%20city%20of%20Naples.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/michigan-pizza-funeral
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Michigan_Pizza_Funeral
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_pizza

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-fantastic-history-of-food--3591729/support.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
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 anynumber of local variations. Now, we
all know the controversy that surrounds certaintoppings, and quite frankly, I am
squarely on the side of those whobelieve that pineapple does not belong on a

(00:21):
pizza. I mean, you don'tsee 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 overon Twitter at Nick Charlie Key or at
Food History Pod. I'll happily debatethis with you, but it would take
something special to get me to changemy mind. Anyway, back to the
matter at hand, pizza's. Now, I've been lucky enough to have tried

(00:42):
authentic Italian pizza in almost every Italiancity 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 theirhumble Italian origins, fifty thousand of these
delicious delicacies were once condemned to amass burial in Michigan and even US pineapple
haters can put aside our differences inthe face of this culinary tragedy. But

(01:04):
for now, let's see what possiblycould have led to this most awful of
outcomes. Welcome to the fantastic historyof food. Strange but true stories from
history that in some way involve food. I'm your host, Nick Charlie Key.

(01:36):
When you start digging into the historyof pizza, it can take you
way back in time, almost seventhousand years in fact, some French and
Italian archaeologists have discovered flatbreads similar infunction to pizzas from that time period on
the Italian island of Sardinia. Butthis island is not the only place in
which history records foods similar to pizzahaving been made. People have been topping

(02:00):
flatbreads with herbs, spices, andother toppings all throughout ancient history, and
possibly one of the coolest and definitelythe 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 andprepping it for cooking in a big fireplace,
but I'm afraid to tell you youcouldn't be more wrong. This Persian

(02:21):
pizza was cooked by none other thanthe Persian soldiers fighting for Emperor Darius the
Great on the front lines of hisEuropean and Asian conquests. And to make
it even more hardcore, these soldierswould cook these flatbreads right on top of
their metal shields. They would preparethe dough, top it with cheese and
dates, two ingredients readily in supplyin a soldier's rations, and once it

(02:44):
was ready for cooking, they wouldlight a fire. When the coals were
hot enough, spread them out evenlyacross 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 rockand roll frying pan. The Greeks would
also go on to create their ownversion of this topped flatbread, called placus,
by adding herbs, onions, cheeseand garlic, and what is probably

(03:07):
the closest iteration we have to whatwe know today. As for Katia,
there even mentions of a pizza likefood in Virgil's poem that Enid, written
around nineteen BC. If you lookhard 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 agoto a Chinese wheat flower street food flattened

(03:30):
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 FrenchAlsas regions, and even earlier forms of
the modern day kiche. But thefirst food to actually be called the pizza
was in sixteenth century Naples. Thecity had originally been founded around six hundred

(03:53):
BC as a Greek settlement, butalong the way would change hands between them
the Spanish and the Italians at varyingtimes throughout the ages. By the seventeen
hundreds it had developed into a bustlingwaterfront 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 dayto day jobs that are needed in a

(04:15):
city of that size, and Napleswas no different. And the closer you
got to the bay itself, themore crowded the population became. So much
so that many people spent most oftheir time outside in the streets and only
went into their homes to find aplace to sleep for the night. This
meant that street food stalls became thede facto way to consume your meals,
and these meals also needed to beinexpensive, able to be eaten quickly and

(04:39):
on the move, and most importantly, without the luxury of cutlery. This
also just happens to be the perfectdescription of a pizza. It was originally
a flatbread with a texture more closelyaligned 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, itbegan to grow into more mainstream popularity when

(05:00):
the Spanish brought back the tomato fromthe Americas. Naples and Sicily were at
this point a part of the SpanishEmpire, and so they were one of
the first to take hold of thesenew world treasures as they arrived back into
Europe. Fast forward a few hundredyears and we see an account from famed

(05:28):
author Alexander Dumar, who tells theorigin story of one of the world's most
famous pizzas on the eleventh of Juneeighteen eighty nine, a pizza maker from
the city of Naples known as RaffaeliEsposito created a pizza in honor of the
Queen of Italy. Now he wantedit to be somewhat patriotic, and so
he decided to recreate the colors ofthe Italian flag in the toppings of his

(05:49):
pizza. This was simple enough,the tomato base for the red, balls
of mozzarella for the white, anda liberal array of basil leaves for the
green. The only thing left todo was to name the pizza, and
seeing as it was in honor ofthe Queen, it made sense to name
it after her, Queen Margherita.Even with the Queen's blessing, it still

(06:12):
took almost another fifty years before pizzabegan to spread out from its southern Italian
roots. Much of this outward expansionwas thanks to a large proportion of Neapolitan
Italians moving to America for factory workand taking their pizza making traditions along with
them. The traditions and evolution ofpizza have grown to almost mythical proportions since
then. A council was founded inNaples designating a particular method and a strict

(06:36):
set of rules for pizza making.For it to be called an authentic Neapolitan
style pizza, it must be neededby hand only, no rolling pins or
mechanical intervention. It must be nowider than thirty five centimeters in diameter,
and it must not be thicker thanone third of a centimeter in the middle.
It must only be cooked in aspecial domed brick oven and heated only

(06:58):
by a wood fire. There areeven some pizzerias in Naples that have an
even stricter standard by which they areallowed to make their pizzas. For them
only the use of San Marzano tomatoesgrown on the slopes of Mount Forsuvius is
allowed for their tomato base, andwhen drizzling the olive oil on top,
it must be done in a clockwisedirection only. As its popularity continued to
grow into other countries around the world, pizza reas began experimenting with different toppings,

(07:24):
and it was in nineteen sixty twothat the most fateful of all pizza
related innovations was first experimented with arestaurateur by the name of sam Panopolis from
the satellite restaurant in chattam Ontario iscredited as being the first person to put
pineapple chunks on a pizza. Andyou know, from a Canadian usually such
a peace loving people, this reallydoes come across as an unprecedented act of

(07:47):
aggression. But the damage has beendone and all we can do is move
on. In all seriousness, eventhis travesty is not the darkest day in
pizza history. No, that unfortunatetime belongs to the state of Michigan in
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(08:11):
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(08:35):
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(08:56):
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(09:18):
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(09:46):
present, Yes hi there, I'myour 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 youwant to find out about the latest cheese

(10:09):
holidays. Yeah, do you wantto hear about some cheese news? Why
is cheddar the most dangerous of allthe cheeses? Wow? Because it's very
sure. Join us for just cheesingthe podcast. It was January of that

(10:37):
year and over in Ohio, employeesat the United Canning Company we're doing a
routine inspection of their stock when theybegan 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 swollencans of anything is never a good sign,
and once these particular ones were sentfor testing, it soon revealed that

(10:58):
these mushrooms were full of a particularlynasty bacteria known as Clostridium bochulinum, which,
if ingested, causes all your musclesto seize up, stop working,
low blood pressure, and in extremecases, even death. The Food and
Drug Administration was alerted and there immediatelypulled any of the remaining cans off the
shelves in the stores, but thenhad the hard task of trying to follow

(11:20):
the supply chain for the rest ofthese products. A vast number of pre
prepared food companies used the mushrooms fromUnited 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 immigrantto the United States and was one of
the people I mentioned earlier who hadbrought pizza culture with him to his new

(11:41):
home. He and his family hadfled Italy during World War Two to escape
fascism and for the promise of abetter life. Once he arrived in the
US, he decided to take hisfamily's pizza recipe and adapt it for American
palettes. Part of this decision wasthe inclusion of mushrooms onto his pizza.
When he got a call from theFDA about the problem with United Canning's mushrooms,

(12:03):
he feared the worst. He immediatelystopped 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 atethe pizza with gusto and impromptly fell down
dead. Fabrini immediately recalled his pizzasfrom local restaurants and grocery stores, even
driving to some himself to collect them, but it seems a few may have

(12:28):
slipped through the net, as seventeenindividuals 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 methodto 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 offeredto put up cash for him as bankruptcy

(12:48):
loomed, and the local priest ledprayers for him at the Sunday church meeting.
For Fabrini, there was only oneoption left to him. He would
hold a funeral for all fifty thousandof his Belo pizzas. So on the

(13:09):
fifth of March nineteen seventy three,dozens of people headed out to a farm
in Ossenique, Michigan, to witnessthe burial of tens of thousands of frozen,
family sized mushroom pizzas. Even theGovernor of Michigan was in attendance and
gave a short speech about having couragein the face of tragedy. Now there's
no record of this whatsoever, butI like to imagine that as he stopped

(13:31):
speaking, a bagpipe began playing,as soldiers raised their rifles and fired off
at twenty one gun salute. Asthe bulldozers closed in an enormous eighteen foot
deep hole had been dug the daybefore, and the bulldozers made light work
of pushing the towering mountains of pizzainto the hole. The owner of the
farm, clearly oblivious to the longterm hazards of plastic, said, from

(13:56):
next fall onwards there will be nothingleft but cellophane. And as the bulldozers
finished their job filling in the holewith dirt, Mario Fabrini walked up solemnly
to the mound to pay his lastrespects. He had two flowers in his
hands, which he laid atop thedirt, a red cladioli flower to represent
the red of his tomato bases,and a white carnation to represent the white

(14:18):
of his mozzarella cheese. Then heturned to the crowd and announced that he
had catered pizzas for all of themright there and then, and these ones,
presumably free of any deadly bacteria.In an even more tragic twist in
this tale, just a few weekslater it was discovered that, unknown to
him, his pizzas had actually beensafe to eat all along. He had

(14:39):
not received any of the tainted batchof mushrooms to begin with, and the
mice that had died in the FDAlab had apparently died of some other different
mouse related illness. According to theirautopsies. Fabrini would take a massive hit
financially and would then lose even moremoney in the years following as he would
have to change his production line aspeople last faith in ushrooms. But in

(15:01):
the end his business would grow backto its former glory, partly thanks to
a court victory that Fbrini one aftersuing the United Canning Company for damages to
the tune of a million dollars.Maybe those strict Neapolitan pizzerias are right,
because, if anything, this talespeaks to the benefits of only using fresh
ingredients where possible in all of ourcooking. Oh and of course no pineapples.

(15:35):
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(15:56):
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(16:18):
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