I was an Army brat, and 1972-1982, we moved all over the place: born in NOLA, then to San Antonio, TX; Tacoma, WA; Stuttgart, Germany; Aurora, Co; Manhattan, KS. When Dad retired from the army, we settled in the D/FW Metroplex.
Because of that, we were constantly having to find new things to eat. Creole food didn’t exist in San Antonio in the early 70s. Tex-Mex hadn’t arrived in the Pacific Northwest then.
In Germany, not only were all of those cuisines absent, the big fast-food franchises that we took for granted were virtually nonexistent, scattered all over the country. We had a KFC, and the closest McDonald’s was in Frankfurt. Pizza was only available on base, and only occasionally.
Coming back to Aurora, we saw none of the European cuisine we’d become accustomed to, and the other stuff was juuuust starting to show up.
In Manhattan, the A&W drive-in was one of the best rated restaurants in town, but we usually went to The Panda- the FAR better of the 2 Chinese restaurants. Or we’d drive to the other side of Fort Riley to get German food in Junction City.
And if course, besides areas’ dominant local cuisines, we were always looking for the ethnic cuisines that had gotten an earlier foothold in the USA- Chinese, Italian, etc.- or whatever had gotten a local foothold, like Polynesian or Filipino.
TL;DR: because we moved around a lot for 10 years, we HAD to try new things to eat because many of our favorites were simply not available.
So our default reaction to new and different food experiences was generally one of “Let’s see what this is like!” If we didn’t like it, we moved on.
In the context of pineapple on pizza, I absolutely cannot remember when I first tried it. But given Asian and Polynesian dishes I’d had in various cities, I probably didn’t think twice about it.
