The dystopian future is usually recognized by corporate wars, cybernetic prosthetics and corpses in alleys. But it’s not this that really gets through, but small everyday laws: the city where you can sew a machine gun under your skin and change your face to a new one officially prohibits putting pineapples on pizza.
Screenshot of the menu of one of the eateries Cyberpunk 2077 reminded me that in Night City this is not a joke, but a line in the rules of the establishment.
Pineapple in the list of toppings is marked as prohibited by law, but artichoke, cauliflower and, what is much worse, locusts peacefully coexist nearby.
The insects on the menu are not a joke from the writers, but a direct consequence of the lore. By 2077, real meat in Night City has become a luxury item, and the majority of the diet is based on synthetics, soy substitutes and insect protein, so a grasshopper in dough looks more logical than chicken.
A separate irony is that one of the world’s megacorporations, BioTechnica, is Italian, and the version about the lobby of defenders of the canonical pizza sounds almost convincing.
The most interesting thing is that the ban is formulated narrowly: only pizza, where pineapple is the only topping, falls under it. Any combination with other ingredients is legal, so you can get pineapple in the city, but they don’t sell pure “pineapple” in establishments.
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Formally, this is not a total ban, but the criminalization of a specific gastronomic perversion.
Reality, however, is not far behind Night City. Hawaiian pizza was invented not in Hawaii or Italy, but in Canada in the early sixties, in the town of Chatham, Ontario, where diner owner Sam Panopoulos first threw canned pineapple onto the dough. And in 2017, Icelandic President Gudni Johannesson honestly said that he would ban such pizza if he had such power, and then explained at length that it was a joke.
