Original photo by Freaktography/ Shutterstock
On March 5, 1973, several hundred people gathered at a farm in tiny Ossineke, Michigan, to witness a burial they would remember for the rest of their lives. One local grocery store closed its doors so employees could attend; even Michigan Governor William G. Milliken dropped by to pay his respects. Was this a funeral for a native son who made good, or perhaps a beloved civic leader? No, it was a ceremony to bid arrivederci to some 30,000 frozen pizzas that may have been harboring dangerous toxins.
Oops, incorrect!
It's a fibThis particular combination of toppings was the brainchild of Greek immigrant Sam Panopoulos, who introduced the Hawaiian pizza at his restaurant in Ontario, Canada, in 1962.
This bizarre scene stemmed from the discovery of swollen mushroom tins at Ohio's United Canning Company two months earlier. After FDA tests revealed the presence of bacteria that causes botulism, calls to United Canning's extended branch of customers eventually reached frozen-pizza maker Mario Fabbrini. When two test mice croaked after eating his mushroom pizza, Fabbrini believed he had no choice but to recall his wares from store shelves and swallow the estimated $60,000 in losses. Attempting the pizza equivalent of turning lemons into lemonade, he announced intentions for a grand "funeral," and arranged for a series of pickup trucks to dump his 30,000 unwanted mushroom pies into an 18-foot hole. After placing a flower garland on the grave — red gladioli to symbolize sauce, white carnations for cheese — Fabbrini served fresh (mushroom-free) pizza to anyone brave enough to partake.
Further tests later showed that the mice had died not from botulism, but from peritonitis, and it was unclear whether their deaths were pizza-related casualties. Sadly, the $250,000 Fabbrini later won in a lawsuit against United Canning and two other defendants wasn’t enough to fully revive his business, and Fabbrini sold the company in the early 1980s. Nevertheless, much like that sauce stain that never entirely disappears from your shirt, the story of the Great Michigan Pizza Funeral endures for those who know where to look.
Numbers Don't Lie
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Mushrooms are the only nonanimal food product that serves as a significant source of vitamin ______.
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Mushrooms are the only nonanimal food product that serves as a significant source of vitamin D.
Atari once buried truckloads of its inventory, including a notoriously awful "E.T." video game.
Video gamers of a certain age may remember the disaster that was “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” an Atari 2600 game based on the blockbuster Steven Spielberg movie. Given just five weeks to have the game in stores by the 1982 Christmas season, designer Howard Scott Warshaw developed an ambitious but deeply flawed product, resulting in a poorly reviewed title that contributed to the company’s $563 million in losses in 1983. That September, Atari deposited 13 truckloads of various game cartridges and computer equipment into the city landfill at Alamogordo, New Mexico. Although contemporary newspapers reported on the event, the legend that lingered was that of Atari secretly dumping their unsold “E.T.” inventory under the cover of darkness to bury the memory of what some called the worst video game ever made. In April 2014, the landfill was excavated as part of the making of the documentary Atari: Game Over; it was called “the first excavation of video games in the history of humanity.” Cartridges of the “E.T.” game were found alongside other titles, such as “Pac-Man” and “Centipede,” as well as decrepit computer parts. Yet unlike Mario Fabbrini and his mushroom pizzas, this story has a happy ending: The sale of items retrieved in the landfill helped raise more than $100,000 for the city of Alamogordo, and Warshaw earned a measure of redemption by receiving a standing ovation after Atari: Game Over screened at Comic-Con that year.
Tim Ott has written for sites including Biography.com, History.com, and MLB.com, and is known to delude himself into thinking he can craft a marketable screenplay.
