“Rest in Pizza”: Remembering The Great Michigan Pizza Funeral

The 1970s will be remembered as the decade that brought us polyester leisure suits, pet rocks, and shag carpeting — and perhaps one of the most unusual funerals in American history. This funeral, held in 1973, attracted the governor of Michigan, required an 18-foot-deep grave, and cost $39,000 at a time when the average funeral would run about $1,000. The craziest part though? This expensive funeral was for 29,000 cheese-and-mushroom pizzas.

Poison pizzas

The Great Michigan Pizza Funeral was the brainchild of Mario Fabbrini, the president of Fabbrini Family Foods of Ossineke, Michigan. Since immigrating to the United States from fascist Croatia, Fabbrini had gone from selling frozen pizzas from his home kitchen to running a factory that employed 22 people and produced 45,000 pizzas for about 1,000 Michigan outlets every week. 

It was in the midst of shipping some of those pizzas in February 1973 that Fabbrini received an alarming call from one of his suppliers that stopped his delivery trucks in their tracks. The supplier shared that an inspector had found botulism toxin — a potentially lethal bacteria — in some of the cans of mushrooms they’d sent to Fabbrini. He had no choice but to recall and dispose of the pizzas containing those mushrooms — about 44,000 of them, at first count.

Pretty cheesy

What does one do with 44,000 poisonous frozen pizzas? For Fabbrini, the answer was to bury them, complete with a high-profile funeral that would serve as part protest, part promotional stunt.

On March 5, 1973, dozens of folks came from far and wide to participate in the graveside service. As a bulldozer shoved what turned out to be about 29,000 cellophane-wrapped pizzas valued at $39,000 into the 18-foot-deep hole, Michigan governor William G. Milliken gave a “brief homily ‘on courage in the face of tragedy,’” according to Atlas Obscura. Afterward, Fabbrini laid a “two-colored flower garland on the grave: red gladioli for sauce, white carnations for cheese.”

Blame the mice

Sadly, the entire incident was all for naught; as one newspaper punnily called it, the recall that started the whole thing was a “grave error.” 

While it was true that two mice died after eating test samples of the pizzas containing the supposedly-tainted mushrooms, the federal government later determined that they didn’t actually die from botulism. It was all a false alarm.

“I think it was indigestion,” Fabbrini told a reporter. “Maybe they didn’t like my pizza.”

(They actually died of peritonitis.)

Fabbrini later sued the mushroom supplier and the canning company for $1 million, the case was settled in 1979 in the Michigan Court of Appeals for about $211,000. Fabbrini’s company went out of business in the 1980s.