The History of PASTA— The Food That Was Never Italian

#History #Food
The history of pasta is a lie — and a far stranger, darker story than the one on the menu.

Pasta feels eternally Italian: sunshine, family, a grandmother rolling dough. But pasta was not invented in Italy, the famous Marco Polo origin story is a fabrication invented for a 1929 advertisement, and for most of its history pasta was not comfort food at all — it was the cheapest fuel for the starving poor.

This is the real, hidden history of pasta. It begins 4,000 years ago with a bowl of millet noodles in ancient China, runs through the Arab traders who perfected dried pasta as the ultimate desert survival food, and lands in Sicily — where a town near Palermo was mass-producing and exporting dried pasta by the boatload more than a century before Marco Polo was even born. From there it becomes the street food of the desperate poor in Naples, long before the New World tomato (once feared as poison) ever met a noodle.

Then the story turns dark: the poverty that drove millions of southern Italians across the ocean with dried pasta in their luggage, and the bizarre moment when Futurist poets and Mussolini’s regime declared war on pasta. And finally the great irony — the rich, saucy “Italian” food the world adores was, to a remarkable degree, invented by poor immigrants in America, before Italy brilliantly reclaimed pasta as its own.

It is the most Italian thing imaginable. And it was never really Italian at all.

And almost none of its real story is on the label.
By https://www.youtube.com/@BeforeItWasFood_YT