Best Pizza Topping

Every topping worth arguing about, and exactly one of them gets to be called the best thing you can put on a pizza. The pineapple question has been running for sixty years with no sign of resolving, which is remarkable for a dispute about fruit. What makes it so durable is that the two sides are arguing about different things entirely: one about flavour combination, the other about category boundaries. Anchovies produce a similar split for a different reason — the people who hate them are usually remembering one bad tinned version from childhood, and the people who love them are talking about a completely different ingredient.

You are choosing among thirty-two toppings, and each is judged alone rather than in combination with anything else.

That constraint is worth noticing, because it changes the answer. Mushrooms are unexceptional by themselves and improve almost everything they are placed next to. Pepperoni is excellent alone and slightly domineering in company. A bracket that asked about combinations would produce a different winner and would be a much harder thing to run fairly.