A Public Funeral Was Held For 30,000 Recalled Frozen Pizzas With The Governor Of Michigan Delivering A Speech On Courage
One funeral, everyone knows the rules. Pour one out for the 30,000 cheese and mushroom pizzas lost during The Great Michigan Pizza Funeral. One of the darkest days, not only in American history, but world history.
Some might say who cares about pizza with mushrooms? But in this story, all pizza lives matter. I'm not one to judge what topping people decide to put on their pizza. We just celebrated the 4th of July, this is a free country. Do what makes you happy. BUT, mushrooms on pizza is gross. Mushrooms and black olives would be on my no fly list.
Before you tell me I have the palette of an 8 year old, and I need to grow up, know that I am a man of culture when it comes to pizza. I am fine with anything from broccoli to pineapple on pizza. It's something about biting into a mushroom and getting the soft chewy texture grosses me out. Still, even the worst pizza is good pizza, and those 30,000 cheese and mushroom pizzas we lost deserved to be laid to rest respectfully.
A self made, small business owner, named Mario Fabbrini was forced into what was at the time the largest pizza recall in U.S. history after the Food & Drug Administration reported the mushrooms on his frozen pizzas tested positive for botulism (a bacteria fatal to humans.)
Fabbrinni and his wife Olga immigrated from Italy, and in less than a decade, the pizza power couple went from selling pizzas out of their home kitchen, to running a pizza factory that employed 22 workers and was churning out 45,000 frozen pizzas a week.
The FDA crackdown would cause the mom and pop pizza company to lose a retail value of $60,000 on the recalled pizzas. Thanks to Fabbrinni's quick thinking, the pizza maker turned the huge profit loss into a genius marketing opportunity - holding a funeral for the lost pizzas. Everyone was invited to mourn the loss, and eat free pizza cooked by Fabbrinni himself. This was the One Bite Pizza Fest of it's time.
The funeral was held March 5, 1973 in Ossineke, Michigan where the factory was located. Ossineke isn't even big enough to be called a town, it's considered a village. Hundreds of the village's 1,800 inhabitants showed up, even the governor of the state of Michigan made an appearance at the burial site to pay his respects and deliver a speech about courage. When the pizzas wrapped in their cellophane coffins had been covered with the final shovel of dirt, Fabbrinni laid red and white flowers on the grave which represented the sauce and cheese that went into the pizza.
Beautiful stuff. Not a chance there was a dry eye in the house.
In the end, it was Fabbrinni crying tears of joy after settling in court with company that supplied the ingredients for $211,000. Which is total bullshit. The real criminal was the FDA. More tests were done on the mushrooms used on the pizza, and it was determined that there was NEVER anything wrong with the mushrooms. The mice used in the study died from something they contracted at the lab, not botulism from the mushrooms. Yet another case of the federal government getting away with a fuck up scot free.
The Great Michigan Pizza Funeral is one tiny sliver of history we discuss in detail on the most recent episode of The Twisted History Podcast - featuring Large, Anne, and myself. On this episode, we even got an exclusive concert performance with Dave Matthews himself Large doing a perfect rendition of DMB's Crash.
Check it out, and be sure to - Download. Rate. Subscribe.
