From crust to crust to crust

Thought-du-jour: Who the hell decided what was on a "Canadian" pizza? Did I miss a parliamentary motion, or a CBC phone-in vote special? And what the hell is so inherently Canadian about them? Did Sir John A. always order them in when he and George-Étienne got really baked on the evenings after Confederation negotiations? Do they present an inherently mosaic-like flavour cross-section in contrast to the muddled flavours of an American pizza pie?

As best I can tell, there are three sub-schools of Canadian pizza: one which is just pepperoni and mushrooms, the second which throws bacon into the mix, and the third which adds the bacon but withholds the pepperoni. I could be wrong. I mean, the genesis of this blog post came from staring at a freezer case full of Pizza Pops in the supermarket, and lord knows comparatively few great thoughts have been birthed there across the sweep of human history.

Pepperoni? Particularly Canadian? Uh, sure, whatever you say.

Mushrooms? Vile, inedible little lumps of oversized mould? Certainly. Contaminants of any fine self-respecting pizza? Absolutely. But Canadian? Again, not really. Maybe there could be special Canadian consideration for the funny-looking ones that grow in rainy forests in coastal BC that seem to make people act all weird. But I get the sense Pizza Pizza would at the very least consider those a deluxe topping.

And Bacon? Getting into more interesting ground here. Certainly, Americans tend to enjoy docking the word "Canadian" to "Bacon." Canadians who might feel inclined to place chest-thumping patriotism ahead of common sense would probably agree with them, and claim bacon (be it peameal-dusted back bacon slices, or, any kind of back bacon slice, or the concept of bacon in general, or hell, the pig) to be part of this bizarre pantheon of "damn-right-its-Canadian" iconography that honestly isn't.

So many things cited by Americans as quirky Canadian exceptionalisms, ironically, enough, just reflect quirky American exceptionalisms. Non-exaustive list follows:

• Vinegar on fries? Totally not a Canadian thing, but instead just a non-American thing. Go to a chipshop in Britain, and shockgasp, vinegar is considered a typical french fry topping. Go to a chipshop in Singapore, and here's betting that the same will hold true. (Now, as Douglas Coupland points out in Souvenir of Canada, the classic four-sided clear-glass vinegar cruet on restaurant tables is distinctly Canadian, but let's not get carried away with blown-glass tableware defining our national character, shall we?)
• Smarties? Yeah, they don't have them in the States. Doesn't change the fact they're originally from Rowntree's in Britain and can be quite readily found at any supermarket checkout in Europe
• Esso? Again, we're kinda on the side of the world on that one. They're the weird-ass freaks with Exxon. Has to do with Standard Oil and their antitrust settlement back in the day, I think.
  
• Zed? Likewise. No more Canadian than the spelling "colour."

So taking us back to bacon for a second, we have another case where they're the somewhat wacky ones, what with the endless "Canadian bacon is ham" references. To the rest of the English-speaking world, bacon is a wide family of pork cuts, of which one are fat-streaked strips or rashers cut from the belly of a pig, and others are slabs, cubes and so on from sides and backs and all sorts of exciting parts of a pig you mightn't want to be reminded are edible. Americans are weird in that they limit the definition to the aforementioned belly bits, what the Brits call "streaky bacon." Because we Commonwealth-inclined Canucks have the gall to refer to other types of bacon as bacon, too, someone decided somewhere along the line that bacon cut from one of those odd places them Canadian fellers think bacon comes from should be identified specifically as "Canadian bacon." And the rest is history.

There's a sort of perverse cultural ignorance and insular look-ma-they-said-Canada-on-the-tee-vee vibe to going along with the idea that something with back bacon on it is inherently Canadian. Pigs in Canada don't have particularly remarkable backs, as far as I can tell. We don't even eat all that much of the stuff: its far more common as part of a fried breakfast on the other side of the pond, while over here we're more likely to go for the greasy stuff off the belly

And yet, that's my working hypothesis as to how the heck a Canadian pizza became a Canadian pizza. Never minding the fact that some Canadian pizzas don't even have the damn stuff on it. That's just fucked.

So there you have it. Canadian pizzas suck, because they potentially advance innaccurate Americentric notions of cultural normalcy, and because they have mushrooms on them. I wish we had something better. Maybe involving strips of harp seal and cheese made from muskox milk.