Great. Reminds me of the start of a Murakami novel. "I was cooking pasta in the kitchen, and carefully preparing a simple salad, when I noticed the clock in the wall began ticking backward. That wasn't all, outside... "
oh I mean "reminds me of” as a term including "sounds like"... and was just copying what I think of as Murakami's style and some of his common tropes such as pasta, cooking, strangeness in mundane situations.
If you're interested in reading, I reckon it's safe to read his books in chronolgical order. You can see how his style and preoccupations develop over the years.
The first story I read was "on meeting the 100% perfect girl one April morning" out of a short story collection called "the elephant vanishes" which is not his first book. I was in a bookshop in early 2003 and just randomly looking for the shortest thing I could possibly read and this story got me hooked on Murakami. and then I think after reading that short story book the next thing I read was "hear the wind sing", his original short novel. And then "pinball 1973" and then I think "Norwegian Wood."
I like his sort of loose universe how similar characters and types of characters and tropes kind of return but the the recurrence is not necessarily central to any of the particular stories they're just kind of like motifs.
Agreed. Murakami introduces all sorts of weird / surrealistic / magical elements into stories, but there's rarely if ever any attempt to explain them. They're just part of the fabric of the story.
Magic realism is kind of weird genre. Sort of "in between" in that "magic shit happens, but in our ordinary world, not a world where magic shit happens". That is, magic happens, but not in a Harry Potter'ish or Tolkein'ish world where magic is explicitly part of the world.
All of that said, I love Murakami. Need to finish reading the rest of his novels one of these days.
During the height of the first pandemic wave in Canada, I literally couldn't find Bucatini anywhere, specifically De Cecco which IMO is superior to some other brands where I live. I went to dozens of supermarkets and they had every variant of pasta except Bucatini and I really couldn't understand what the heck was going on.
I just bought some for pickup at target.com. Their Good & Gather brand Bucatini [1] is available in a couple of stores in the East Bay Area (Alameda, Albany). I hope you can find some locally.
At the beginning of the article I was thinking surely there are more important things to write about, but it dives down a pretty absurd rabbit hole. Especially funny is when the pasta spokesperson begins commiserating that the reporter is making more work for them.
It's a good point though. Why/how is something unsafe for an American, but safe for an Italian or Spaniard?
Differing regulations and standards between countries usually makes no sense and just harms the consumer.
How is a Volvo made for the Swedish market unsafe on Canadian roads? EU and Canada recently signed a trade agreement so that they won't tariff eachothers' cars, but consumers still can't buy a car from a European dealer and have it shipped over.
Or vaccines. Why isn't there a global approval system?
Yeah yeah, everyone can point to an example where their regulatory agency's anxieties/delays/negligence prevented some issue, but fail to consider the impacts of all of their other delays/rejections.
There are various regulatory trade-offs between safety and cost of compliance. For instance: Cars sold as new in Canada require daytime running lights and yellow rear turn signals, due to extended periods of low visibility. While the running lights are a requirement in Sweden, they aren't in Poland or many other European countries. There's been some effort on standardizing between US and Canada since 2016, which would allow for a North American market car to solely use yellow turn signals, but progress is slow.
Which is why we probably won't see much progress in harmonizing bigger regulations. Whose regulation gets to win? This has been a five-year fight over the color of a piece of plastic. Everyone even wants to agree - the automotive industry would love a worldwide standard to reduce specialized part count, rulemakers would love to agree in order to increase the shared market size (so everyone gets the same cars), but the actual standard to be put into place calls into conflict the exact safety versus cost thresholds each government has set. Imagine if there's actual conflict.
It isn't even about the colour (which is trivial to control with software and 8 extra cents in LEDs), but about the colour of the plastic.
That's the dumb thing that proves it's about protectionism. Same with DRL: it's controllable in software.
Meanwhile, Canada lets you import any >17 year old hunk of junk from anywhere and that's somehow safe and okay (because it doesn't harm new car sales so directly, yet still much more fatal to occupants).
There are far more important reasons to do this than protectionism and it's disingenuous to skip them and jump straight to protectionism.
Banning old cars would harm the parts of the population which can't afford brand new cars (that's a huge chunk) and guarantees that every time regulation demands something new everyone has to buy a new car.
On the other hand not mandating new safety tech harms everyone in general and guarantees that cars new and old will forever be much worse than they need to be since manufacturers won't be in a hurry to spend more money on tech. Keep in mind that a car with DRL and ABS will be an "old car" a few years from now. 10+ year old cars have ABS today because at some point it was mandated on all new cars.
It's a reasonable compromise to let people buy and use the old cars as they are (or anything that uses old, outdated tech - lead based solder in electronics?) but demand that new ones constantly integrate new tech.
From what I’ve seen, the >17yr old imports aren’t to save money, but your chance to finally drive something exotic that wasn’t (or wouldn’t) be approved for sale here. E.g. RHD, Kei cars, Nissan Skylines
As someone passively enthusiast about cars, I think that's in general a good thing. People buying classic/old cars generally know it's not going to have current safety regulations, but may still appreciate it and take the risks.
I'm font on retro/rust-mods where they're updated with modern engines, controls, etc... others prefer completely stock/original as possible. In the end, it's not so different from being able to maintain a listed building in England or other heritage or historical works, other than it rolls down the roads.
For those who haven't been to the US, I was blown away that some cars use brake lights as the turn indicator - good video on the set up (and issues): https://youtu.be/O1lZ9n2bxWA
I was confused the first time I saw this in the US. Thanks for sharing the video, but nonetheless I’m still surprised that something as common sense as amber vs red lights for different functions is still something US-bound models fail to adopt. As the video explains cost saving must not longer be an issue, so I guess it is regulatory inertia.
Slightly different regulations between EU and US/CA:
> "The colour of the turn signals on vehicles in Europe is legislated to be amber," says Thomas Tetzlaff, spokesman for Volkswagen Canada. "In North America, there is no such legislation, but there are different regulations about the minimal surface area of the blinkers."
> North American regulations say rear signal lights can be either red or amber. Canada and the U.S. specify a minimum size for turn signal lights, but regulations in the rest if the world do not, Transport Canada says.
> Often, the easiest way for companies to get their turn signals big enough, without building brand new rear lights specifically for North America, is to also use the brake light as a turn signal, Tetzlaff says.
All new EU models have daytime running lights and yellow turn lights. What ever is a requirement in Sweden is basically an EU one as well. Thanks to standardized EU certifications. Which is a good thing, mostly!
It’s true that EU regulation on this topic was harmonized in 2011. However, the harmonization actually loosened the Swedish requirements in several ways, particularly with regard to rear lights, which previously were required to be always on.
I wouldn't imagine the power draw from always-on rear lights to be especially high compared to, you know, actually moving the vehicle, especially if those lights are LEDs. And the studies I'm finding measuring this exact concern don't seem to show particularly significant impacts on fuel efficiency / emissions for ICE vehicles (a couple percent, tops, and that's assuming small cars w/ tiny engines and some pretty comically inefficient DRL implementations - hardly relevant for creating a new standard that can mandate e.g. dedicated LED-based DRL systems).
I bought a car (Citroën) a few years ago, and told the dealer I wanted it so the rear lights would always be on. They configured whatever doohickey is responsible for that, and made sure to charge me for it. But now the rear lights are always on, like they're supposed to, and I feel a little safer.
I think it's super dumb that it's not a requirement any more, and I don't see any reason for the change.
That's what we have California for. They're like america's exhausted mother, constantly swooping in to prevent us putting bad things in our mouths or being jerks to other kids.
Daytime lights are obligatory in Poland since it joined EU - so for like 15 years.
The standard is the same for whole EU.
If your car does not have those weak daytime lights (small lamps that basically dont do anything) then you are supposed to use the low/dipped beam. And most drivers use low beam all the time.
Using DRL during the day (i.e. normal visibility) is not mandatory in Austria. You may use them, or dipped beam, if you choose so.
There is one more difference between DRL in EU and NA: in EU, the parking lights must be off, while DRL is on. This is a problem with some older cars, which technically do have DRL, but keep the parking lights on (i.e. pre-F series BMW; the angel eyes are parking light). This is non compliant in EU.
> This has been a five-year fight over the color of a piece of plastic.
In the EU the turn signals is mandated to be amber. In the US/CA, the turn signal can be either amber or red, but must be of a certain area. Other jurisdictions do not have an area regulation.
So OEMs simply make brake lights double as turn signals when they import vehicles.
If the non-US OEMs 'just' made bigger turn signals they wouldn't have to do this.
> It's a good point though. Why/how is something unsafe for an American, but safe for an Italian or Spaniard?
America has a longstanding tradition of food fortification. Niacin is also used to supplement US diets featuring a corn staple -- corn's niacin is not bioavailable without additional processing traditional to Mesoamerican cultures. Probably more recognized today is iodized salt, which is responsible for perhaps a decade's worth of the Flynn effect in the US.
In the case of flour, Europe is lagging behind: https://www.ffinetwork.org/europe. Apparently Denmark went the extra step of banning enriched / fortified foods. You could probably argue that regional diets will naturally vary and that something like iodine supplements aren't required for Italians when they have ready access to seafood that Oklahomans don't. But since I'm pretty sure these enrichments aren't harmful to those who do have access, I imagine some of the divide is simply protectionism -- protecting your local markets and local manufacturers from cheaper American brands.
I've no idea how much Niacin is added in America, but you can have too much. Since we don't eat much corn here in Europe, packing food unnecessarily full of this supplement could be dangerous to health:
Niacin Toxicity
Symptoms of toxicity include: Flushing of the skin, primarily on the face, arms, and chest *This side effect may occur at doses as low as 30 mg/day. Itching. Nausea. Vomiting.
I'm really not sure where that citation is coming from. It's a Google web answer but the source has no citation. Wikipedia lists a textbook, rather than anything from NCBI, and I'm too lazy to dig further. A corn torilla or slice of bread in the US typically has 1-2 mg of niacin, and a daily recommendation of around 16mg.
3 oz (85 grams) of "Chicken breast, meat only, grilled" contains 10.3 grams of the stuff[1], and average adults get about 30mg/day. Best I can tell this is about nicotinic acid specifically, and might be IV rather than ingestion, which is very much an apples and oranges situation.
Agree, I didn't dig - was the first result I found.
Fact is though, that here in Europe there is no need or value in adding this supplement, and generally the EU is wary of any adulterated foods without reason.
Domestic producers of [all products] in [all countries] have a longstanding tradition of using the apparatus of government to protect their business from competition. These arguments typically take the form of national security, consumer safety and unfair competitive practices.
In some cases these arguments are made in good faith.
In even rarer cases these arguments are true.
But initially it's wise to take them with a grain of salt.
Cars of the same model made for different markets have varying safety features. US destination Japanese cars have better crash protection than those made for their domestic market.
In this particular case it's not even a matter of safety: pasta with <13 mg/lb of iron is no more or less safe than pasta with >13 mg/lb, and as far as I can tell (read: Wikipedia) iron deficiency does not appear to be a serious health problem for most Americans (or Europeans). If anything, mandatory enrichment seems like an arbitrary trade barrier imposed on the US side to protect what the article calls "Big Pasta" from foreign interlopers.
Different regions have diets made up of different ingredients, which have different levels of various minerals. Humans don't all eat the exact same thing and they don't all exist in the same exact climate so regulations tend to be curated to their local constituents.
Furthermore, in many European nations the pasta is enriched, mainly with fiber although plenty of other nutrients are added depending on the brand and market. European countries just don't have regulations regarding "enriched macaroni" labeling like the US, which is an interesting historical quirk but irrelevant to what's actually in the pasta. Popular brands like Barilla are almost certainly enriched with something - depending on the size of the market it might have been enriched to American standards just to minimize manufacturing fragmentation (i.e. Italy, a huge consumer of pasta and origin of many of the brands will have formulas dedicated to that market, while Norway will receive whatever other formula is closest to their requirements).
I'm not even opposed to iron enrichment for the basic flour used to make Wonderbread-type cheap staples, but mandating it for fancy imported bucatini seems more than a little ridiculous.
"Standards of Identification" are not about safety, but rather marketplace regulation against deception. After all, if it was about safety, then ramen noodles wouldn't be sold at all.
Rather, it is (or was, originally) about protecting the brand of pasta noodles vs. ramen noodles, at a time when the difference was not as readily apparently to consumers.
It's the type of regulation that determines what is a "HD" tv, for example.
> It's a good point though. Why/how is something unsafe for an American, but safe for an Italian or Spaniard?
We don't need to wonder! They explain it right in the article: protectionism. It's not really that surprising that a lot of regulations have nothing to do with protecting the consumer and are all about protecting the parties that really matter to governments: big domestic industries.
> Around World War II, Carl explained, the established noodle industry (henceforth referred to as Big Pasta) was “upset” by the introduction of Nissin’s ramen noodles into the country, which were “completely out of spec” with what the United States then recognized as noodles — specifically because the ramen was being sold for a lower price and with what Carl called “lower standards” of nutrition. “They were really pressed,” said Carl. That’s when the “standards of identity” were created: Big Pasta made sure that all noodles had to meet certain specifications to be considered “enriched macaroni products” and sold in the United States.
“Standards of Identity” are not in and of themselves a bad thing. If a product comes to market claiming to be one thing but it is not, it may damage the market for all other products. Imagine a tv manufacturer claiming to sell a HD tv that is not HD, for example.
In this case, the pasta industry did not want their product confused with the new noodles coming from Nissin; this was back in the days when many Americans may not have readily known the difference between pasta noodles and ramen noodles, and wondered why they were paying more for pasta than they could for ramen.
Now those rules might be perverted to suit protectionist goals, but that’s the whole art of effective hopefully minimalist regulation: it’s very hard to do.
Alternatively, it might be the fact that the pasta company in question was selling buccatini at a lower price, a competitor did an analysis, and they found that this company was saving money by skirting regulation that everyone else is complying with. And they did the right thing by forcing the FDA to apply the rules evenly to all companies.
> Now those rules might be perverted to suit protectionist goals, but that’s the whole art of effective hopefully minimalist regulation: it’s very hard to do.
Agreed. I'm not saying there's no rational underpinning to regulation, just that it's frequently gamed by bad actors, almost to the point that the original intent is forgotten.
That's the importance of regulatory harmonisation. Eg your laptop charger is probably covered in 20 different indecipherable logos showing compliance with every countries regulators, all of whom have standards at least 99.9% identical. The EU has harmonised regulations internally in order to make completely free trade work, so a single 'CE' logo is enough to show compliance for the entire EU.
Regulatory harmonisation is controversial though, especially here in UK. No matter that its usually boring stuff like agreeing fire retardant coatings on soft furnishings, the newspapers insisted this was a breach of sovereignty. Expect a new British safety standard (identical but with a different logo) to join the pack.
Note that there is the CE symbol (confirmation of Europan standards) and there is also a very simila CE symbol that means "China Export". The second one does not have anything to do with European standards. It is deceptively similar.. guess why
Edit: I'm going to go through every single device/cable I have at home and examine the font and the arrangement of the two letters now, the C and the E need to be on two circles that overlap by exactly the width of the lines.
I think part of the puzzle is why they would cheat by stamping a logo that is almost right but not quite. Is it that their level of honesty such that they wouldn't cheat regulations but would cheat a trademark? Maybe they themselves can't tell which logo is the correct one so they just stamp anything?
>I think part of the puzzle is why they would cheat by stamping a logo that is almost right but not quite. Is it that their level of honesty such that they wouldn't cheat regulations but would cheat a trademark?
Maybe it's a lie that they tell themselves so they can sleep better at night. It's not unlike how "sovereign citizens" believe in various flawed legal arguments to justify how they don't have to pay taxes.
Do you know if there’s an accurate master list of these labels anywhere? I’m sure the customs and border people must have at least a reference copy floating around.
Regulation isn't made just by health/safety perspective, but includes cultural, social and others.
For example, Katsuobushi is the core part of Japanese food but it seems that exporting to Europe is difficult due to EU regulation. Another example in Japan would be K-car.
As a Japanese, I never want to give up Katuobushi for improving health. I suspect that maybe oppositely, European people also has food or culture that banned from other country .
The article you linked makes it rather clear that the reason for banning imports has nothing to do with culture but with the carcinogens in the product. The Spanish factory uses a safer smoking process.
Some Kei-cars were and are sold in Europe, but they are regulated the same as any other car, rather than having specific tax and regulatory advantages like they do in Japan.
This also means that the European variants don't have to meet the kei-car regulations regarding size, engine capacity or power output, so some of them are a bit bigger or have more powerful engines.
Wasabi is impossible to get in the USA, my understanding was that this was because of Japan's rules rather than those if the USA. We just have horseradish with green food coloring in the USA.
It's not impossible, it's just expensive to import and difficult to store. Higher end sushi places would usually have it. Now there are at least two farms in the US producing it that I know of, one in Washington state, and another in Half Moon Bay, near San Francisco, and there's even some retail distribution now in SF.
That is very exciting! My old karate instructor owned a sushi restaurant and I got the strong impression that the mob looked poorly on attempts to export. He may have been exaggerating.
It seems that regulations are often a little more lax on products produced domestically.
Can we trust states with major pharmaceutical industries to regulate pharmaceuticals? Major car production centres to regulate emissions? Major chemicals companies to regulate chemicals?
I'd be a little suspicious, living next to such a country, if they insist on my adopting the regulations they wrote, which of course their industries all successfully meet to the letter.
> Differing regulations and standards between countries usually makes no sense and just harms the consumer.
It's true that they don't make much sense and that they often harm the consumer, but I vote in my regional politicians and in theory can vote them out if they impose standards I don't like.
One of the problems with Europe was the perceived lack of democratic control coupled with the dishonesty from anti_EU campaigners about things like straight bananas.
I work for an automotive manufacturer that has a model that couldn’t be sold in the United States due to its lack of a steering column airbag (probably along with other items). It has led to an aggressive destruction of imported vehicles by customs officials and seizing of legal vehicles due to mistaken identity.
I don’t care for this, but I understand it. Rarely do we hear about the lives that were saved thanks to the regulatory body doing its job.
Aerospace goy pretty close, with EASA and the FAA accepting each others certification. Until the FAA blew the 737 MAX and everyone had to show how tough they are. And because the FAA did screw up.
> Or vaccines. Why isn't there a global approval system?
Global systems are inherently more fragile, no? More eyes on something is always a good thing, less likely to be corrupted by corporate interests, etc...
Different product, but eggs make an interesting example of why:
Both USA and UK markets take steps to avoid salmonella. The method the USA requires the eggs to be refrigerated, the method the UK uses effectively requires that they are not (at least not until you get them home, once you start you can’t stop).
This was just luck. An aircraft with a special randomly-initiate-death-plunge function will crash somewhere first and somewhere else second. If the public is stupid enough to keep flying in it, eventually it will crash all over the place. In this case, the flying public decided that two horrible crashes was enough.
You get objections to GMO food in Europe while in the US this doesn't even have to be labelled.
Chocolate standards that mean most US chocolate cannot legally be called chocolate in Europe as it doesn't contain enough cocoa.
Chicken has to be chlorine washed in the US before sale, a practice that is prohibited in Europe.
Eggs in the US are washed before sale which makes it necessary to keep them in the fridge afterwards while in Europe eggs are nornally sold unwashed (in some countries (all EU?) It's even prohibited to wash them).
Let's not even talk standards for wine and raw milk cheese, use of corn syrup, regional denominations, slaughter and animal welfare rules, ...
Not easy to find a simple resolution to such strong differences in some sectors. Opposition to trade deals among Europeans usually stem from (1) fears of lower food standards (incl. animal welfare), (2) worries about slavery and labour exploitation and (3) worries about low environmental standars. I'm sure the US has similar recurring themes popping up.
It is a wonderful pasta, but doesn't really surprise me that there could be a shortage as it isn't necessarily a pasta that every grocery store will carry. In my own little community (founded by Italians...), there's only one place that carries it with any regularity anyway.
The straws theory is mentioned, yes, but the article specifically details how the FDA action was based on the measured iron content of De Cecco's pasta, and it also discusses reasons for scarcity of other manufacturers' bucatini.
More interesting is that the FDA apparently never spot checks these sorts of things, so the claim is Big Pasta has some sort of axe to grind against De Cecco.
It seems like a major brand changed flour suppliers, falling under the FDA-required amount of iron, and thus not being allowed to import it. I don't think that is indicative of any wider issues, except that the government might be interfering with your food a little bit too much.
I am afraid this article will resurrect shortage even if it ended lately: I never cared about pasta shapes, but now I want bucatini. With 52 hacker news points there goes national stock of bucatini.
I found that comment kind of odd, since the real king of sauce absorption is spaghetti rigati - spaghetti with ridges.
Bucatini has good sauce absorption but imho its claim to fame is its thickness, mouthfeel, and rigidity, which the author hilariously and accurately refers to as "sentient". It has a mind of its own.
There are two similar noodle shapes, pici and Strozzapreti (literally "priest stranglers") but they are even harder to find.
Wegmans is a no-go where I live, thanks to an old 'handshake agreement' between the Wegman and Golub families, in that there would be no overlap between Wegmans and Price Chopper territory. :(
I'll have to check Hannaford and Shoprite instead.
People don't seem to take action based on these things. I was concerned about not being able to buy vitamin D because of so many articles positively correlating it with good COVID-19 outcomes... but had no trouble buying it recently.
I'm not sure why this article is being published now (dated December 28, 2020) if the shortage was really in March. It doesn't seem like it's still an issue. Amazon has tons of bucatini for sale, many available in a day with Prime: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=bucatini
tl;dr most pasta brands are pruning lower volume SKUs during the pandemic, and in addition De Cecco is running into some kind of FDA enforcement action against its bucatini because of low iron content.
That's true, right? All in all it's just pasta. I'm Italian so I it got my attention. I thought I would never have gone through all the article but in the end, that's exactlt what happened.
It’s hard to imagine any writer who pitched doing a piece like this to the marketing department of a pasta company not just being told to fuck off. If it was possible to make money writing articles like this, there would be a lot more of them.
It's not hard, it just takes a long time, which costs $$$. That's why it's very very unlikely to be sponsored, because no CPG company is going to spend 100k to commission a writer to spend several months working on an art piece. Except maybe Red Bull, but this isn't about Red Bull.
James Lord, biographer, to Alberto Giacometti, while watching the artist draw him: "It looks so easy."
Giacometti: "It is easy. All it takes is a lifetime."
Is that the going rate nowadays for a competent investigative writer? I thought the major conglomerates also commission these ‘art pieces’ at a decent rate.
I don’t recall ever having it until reproducing a Hello Fresh recipe that we had previously eaten and wanted to make from scratch. My daughter is a budding foodie and wondered if we could find the bucatini. I aired her what that was and she said it was the type of pasta in the dish (that I had eaten) and that they were like noodle straws.
I bought the last box at Kroger somewhat intrigued. It took a bit longer than spaghetti to cook, and honestly I didn’t find it particularly interesting. Just a fat noodle that wasn’t particularly good at holding on to the sauce.
I'm Italian, but I've never been that partial to bucatini, I'm more in the spaghetti or rigatoni camp myself. My niece would kill for them, but I think that her being seven and liking "strange pastas" like ruote and such has something to do with it.
Yeah, it is a tube form of the same old pasta that's in spaghetti. I don't understand the fuss. It's actually not great. Try getting cooking water out of them. I would go with rotini or radiatore if I really needed the surface area otherwise a ribbon pasta like fettucine or tagliatelle, almost every time. Not a fan.
I bought it by mistake once -- or because the supermarket was out of spaghetti and it looked "close enough", as you couldn't see the hole from the packet -- and I can't say I was impressed. I feel I may have overcooked it though; it had a similar texture to udon noodles, which didn't really work with whatever it was I was making.
I found the premise of this odd. I also live in Brooklyn and have had no issues finding bucatini this year. It's consistently in stock at my nearby whole foods.
I can buy 20 pounds on Amazon for $40. I wish the author had addressed this solution to his perceived shortage. Is this some bad brand? Are all these brands sucky? Did the author forget to google for mail order pasta? Did all these companies in Italy not work out for him?
This journalist needs a journalist friend to help cover his story.
That's around €3.60/kg, which is considered in Italy a quick way to get street riots. Go over €4/kg and you'll get a full blown revolution, complete with a fully functional guillotine.
In my local supermarket 500g of bucatini De Cecco come for €.99, which is around $1.22. I understand that pasta in considered a specialty on the other side of the pond, but it is still basically just (semolina) flour and water, and no matter how fancy it could be, it's outrageous to pay that much for something mass produced.
Barilla sells for $1.25 to $1.50 for 454 grams (1 lb) in the US; that's getting close to $2 per lb. De Cecco is premium stuff here. I've seen $4 per lb, which is like $9 per kg.
Barilla is also one of the more generic and blander pastas; once you switch to the higher end, bronze extruded brands, it gets immeediately clear why they cost more. It's still better than some non-Italians brands that are made in normal wheat flour instead of durum wheat semolina, and look so pale and dull they maks you wonder why you didn't cook rice instead.
I agree, but I think many dry goods are poorly priced on Amazon as they are sold by arbitragers taking advantage of people who don’t know or care.
There were many better prices available, but I was just sanity checking the author who wrote lots and lots making it sound like her favorite pasta was unavailable. So I want trying to find an optimal prices just trying to see if it’s actually unavailable (it isn’t).
At my local market pasta is usually $.7-1/pound. And if I go to specialty markets or Whole Foods the price can get 2-5x higher.
Fun article but I can’t seem to match their excitement for the cut... to me it’s just spaghetti that’s much harder to slurp on account of it being a straw.
It’s an interesting reminder that a lot of simple staples in the US are fortified with various nutrients. It almost transforms your view such that it’s less you buying food, and more the government providing your provisions so that you’re a healthy worker. I found myself recalling an article on Britain’s National Loaf.
A very good friend of mine moved to Texas a year ago from Europe. Every time she visits, she is astonished that grocery shopping at discounters in Germany ends up being healthier that when she tries to get "healthy" groceries in the US. No idea if this holds true, but I had the same impression vacationing in New York (obviously not representative). I do see quality differences between German and French supermarkets as well, with quality in France being better.
I largely prefer not enriched food, including salt. It just tastes better, IMHO.
But when gemelli disappeared for several months I was distraught. Nothing is better in mac'n'cheese.
I make it in a cake pan, less than an inch deep, with sourdough cubes and grated cheese on top, toasted to a crisp. The mac really is just there to hold up the cheese toast. But that doesn't stop me from putting in chopped chili peppers (not too much, 2 oz is plenty!), nutmeg, and a hint of cayenne.
Strozzapreti can substitute for gemelli, but it is even harder to find any of.
Great article, but I have to admit I'm a bit surprised by the adoration here: I've on occasion accidentally bought bucatini when I wanted spaghetti, and was mostly annoyed by the tubes squirting out hot water when I tried to eat them like they were spaghetti. Any bucatini-optimized pasta recipes to recommend?
Do you finish the pasta in the sauce? That helps coat the pasta in the sauce, both inside and out.
Basically take the pasta out of the water a few minutes early, put it in a pan with the sauce and some of the pasta cooking water, and finish cooking it there.
Bucatini alla amatriciana or bucatini alla carbonara. But I'm not sure if you will be able to find Guanciale (a derivate of pork jowl or cheeks) and Pecorino cheese. You can replace Guanciale with cubes of -smoked- bacon (please forgive me italian readers) and Pecorino with Parmigiano Reggiano cheese (that should be more easier to find).
Important: as shared by other HN users, remember to put the pasta out of hot water a couple of minutes before the cooking time and stir it on a hot pan with the sauce for the last 2 minutes. Make sure to add also a few tablespoons of the hot (salted) water you used to cook the pasta, this helps to make the cream effect.
The point isn't whether the word "alimentary" means anything. You probably know related words like "alimony." (Tangentially, the humorous novel Through the Alimentary Canal with Gun and Camera is a surprising early precursor to Fantastic Voyage and related stories of microscopic explorers inside the human body.)
The point is that calling any food product "alimentary paste" is hilariously unappetizing.
'Paste' is an old word for pastry, too. It makes old recipes rather odd sounding [1]:
> make six or eight ounces of paste as No. 319, roll it to the thickness of a quarter of an inch, or a little more, put pudding-cloth in a basin, sprinkle some flour over it, lay in your paste, and then the meat, together with a few pieces of fat; when full put in three wineglasses of water; turn the paste over the meat, so as not to form a lump, but well closed; then tie the cloth
Pasta, pastry, paste, pasty. All related words. The French for pastry is pâte. Pâté means "pasted" as in "pasted fish".
The French aliment simply means food, although it's not spoken very often in France. The word exists in English but it's quite rare and normally used in legal contexts like so many other words of French origin.
Kiełbasa and Pierogi are whole classes of products but in US kiełbasa is a particular kind of Polish sousage and pierogi basically means ruskie pierogi.
That's how foreign languages work. In Polish "rower" means "a bicycle" because british company Rover sold them here first :) In Russian and Ukrainian vogzal means "train station" because there was a famous train station in Vauxhal :)
Another fun one: the word for "marker" (i.e., a felt-tipped pen for drawing) is "фломастер," from the brand Flo-Master.
Although, given the way things are going, it wouldn't surprise me if the word was now "шарпи."
Surprisingly, the art supply brand Caran d'Ache is from the Russian "карандаш" and not vice versa.
The Ukrainian for "pencil" simply comes from the word for the metal tin, which, like lead metal, was in use for styluses used in drawing before the discovery of graphite.
To add a couple more examples; in polish "Makaron" is all pasta (same as above), while in German "Nudeln" (noodles) is also synonymous with all pasta (even maccaroni!).
The article doesn't mention "alimentary paste" anywhere, so your remark comes off as assertive, yet I couldn't find traceability to this term in what I believe to be the applicable federal statute[1].
Strangely, one of the first pasta casualties we noticed in Singapore was bucatini disappearing from the shelves here as well. Which has nothing to do with the FDA issue brought up in the article, but probably has to do with the comment in the article that pasta makers were reducing the output of less popular SKUs...hoping bucatini makes a comeback in 2021!
The real story behind this article is that the reporter is trying to give bucatini a PR boost and rescue it from its current fate as an unpopular SKU. Mission accomplished? Check back in 10 years.
332 comments
[ 0.15 ms ] story [ 295 ms ] threadIf you're interested in reading, I reckon it's safe to read his books in chronolgical order. You can see how his style and preoccupations develop over the years.
The first story I read was "on meeting the 100% perfect girl one April morning" out of a short story collection called "the elephant vanishes" which is not his first book. I was in a bookshop in early 2003 and just randomly looking for the shortest thing I could possibly read and this story got me hooked on Murakami. and then I think after reading that short story book the next thing I read was "hear the wind sing", his original short novel. And then "pinball 1973" and then I think "Norwegian Wood."
I like his sort of loose universe how similar characters and types of characters and tropes kind of return but the the recurrence is not necessarily central to any of the particular stories they're just kind of like motifs.
Magic realism is kind of weird genre. Sort of "in between" in that "magic shit happens, but in our ordinary world, not a world where magic shit happens". That is, magic happens, but not in a Harry Potter'ish or Tolkein'ish world where magic is explicitly part of the world.
All of that said, I love Murakami. Need to finish reading the rest of his novels one of these days.
It's certainly not science fiction but I loved it.
During the height of the first pandemic wave in Canada, I literally couldn't find Bucatini anywhere, specifically De Cecco which IMO is superior to some other brands where I live. I went to dozens of supermarkets and they had every variant of pasta except Bucatini and I really couldn't understand what the heck was going on.
https://ca.camelcamelcamel.com/product/B07N21XB55
but like 5x the price on .com
https://www.amazon.com/Molisana-Italian-Bucatini-oz-Pkgs/dp/...
1. https://www.target.com/p/signature-bucatini-16oz-good-38-gat...
Differing regulations and standards between countries usually makes no sense and just harms the consumer.
How is a Volvo made for the Swedish market unsafe on Canadian roads? EU and Canada recently signed a trade agreement so that they won't tariff eachothers' cars, but consumers still can't buy a car from a European dealer and have it shipped over.
Or vaccines. Why isn't there a global approval system?
Yeah yeah, everyone can point to an example where their regulatory agency's anxieties/delays/negligence prevented some issue, but fail to consider the impacts of all of their other delays/rejections.
Which is why we probably won't see much progress in harmonizing bigger regulations. Whose regulation gets to win? This has been a five-year fight over the color of a piece of plastic. Everyone even wants to agree - the automotive industry would love a worldwide standard to reduce specialized part count, rulemakers would love to agree in order to increase the shared market size (so everyone gets the same cars), but the actual standard to be put into place calls into conflict the exact safety versus cost thresholds each government has set. Imagine if there's actual conflict.
It isn't even about the colour (which is trivial to control with software and 8 extra cents in LEDs), but about the colour of the plastic.
That's the dumb thing that proves it's about protectionism. Same with DRL: it's controllable in software.
Meanwhile, Canada lets you import any >17 year old hunk of junk from anywhere and that's somehow safe and okay (because it doesn't harm new car sales so directly, yet still much more fatal to occupants).
There are far more important reasons to do this than protectionism and it's disingenuous to skip them and jump straight to protectionism.
Banning old cars would harm the parts of the population which can't afford brand new cars (that's a huge chunk) and guarantees that every time regulation demands something new everyone has to buy a new car.
On the other hand not mandating new safety tech harms everyone in general and guarantees that cars new and old will forever be much worse than they need to be since manufacturers won't be in a hurry to spend more money on tech. Keep in mind that a car with DRL and ABS will be an "old car" a few years from now. 10+ year old cars have ABS today because at some point it was mandated on all new cars.
It's a reasonable compromise to let people buy and use the old cars as they are (or anything that uses old, outdated tech - lead based solder in electronics?) but demand that new ones constantly integrate new tech.
I'm font on retro/rust-mods where they're updated with modern engines, controls, etc... others prefer completely stock/original as possible. In the end, it's not so different from being able to maintain a listed building in England or other heritage or historical works, other than it rolls down the roads.
> "The colour of the turn signals on vehicles in Europe is legislated to be amber," says Thomas Tetzlaff, spokesman for Volkswagen Canada. "In North America, there is no such legislation, but there are different regulations about the minimal surface area of the blinkers."
> North American regulations say rear signal lights can be either red or amber. Canada and the U.S. specify a minimum size for turn signal lights, but regulations in the rest if the world do not, Transport Canada says.
> Often, the easiest way for companies to get their turn signals big enough, without building brand new rear lights specifically for North America, is to also use the brake light as a turn signal, Tetzlaff says.
* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/culture/commutin...
I think it's super dumb that it's not a requirement any more, and I don't see any reason for the change.
If your car does not have those weak daytime lights (small lamps that basically dont do anything) then you are supposed to use the low/dipped beam. And most drivers use low beam all the time.
There is one more difference between DRL in EU and NA: in EU, the parking lights must be off, while DRL is on. This is a problem with some older cars, which technically do have DRL, but keep the parking lights on (i.e. pre-F series BMW; the angel eyes are parking light). This is non compliant in EU.
In the EU the turn signals is mandated to be amber. In the US/CA, the turn signal can be either amber or red, but must be of a certain area. Other jurisdictions do not have an area regulation.
So OEMs simply make brake lights double as turn signals when they import vehicles.
If the non-US OEMs 'just' made bigger turn signals they wouldn't have to do this.
America has a longstanding tradition of food fortification. Niacin is also used to supplement US diets featuring a corn staple -- corn's niacin is not bioavailable without additional processing traditional to Mesoamerican cultures. Probably more recognized today is iodized salt, which is responsible for perhaps a decade's worth of the Flynn effect in the US.
In the case of flour, Europe is lagging behind: https://www.ffinetwork.org/europe. Apparently Denmark went the extra step of banning enriched / fortified foods. You could probably argue that regional diets will naturally vary and that something like iodine supplements aren't required for Italians when they have ready access to seafood that Oklahomans don't. But since I'm pretty sure these enrichments aren't harmful to those who do have access, I imagine some of the divide is simply protectionism -- protecting your local markets and local manufacturers from cheaper American brands.
Niacin Toxicity
Symptoms of toxicity include: Flushing of the skin, primarily on the face, arms, and chest *This side effect may occur at doses as low as 30 mg/day. Itching. Nausea. Vomiting.
3 oz (85 grams) of "Chicken breast, meat only, grilled" contains 10.3 grams of the stuff[1], and average adults get about 30mg/day. Best I can tell this is about nicotinic acid specifically, and might be IV rather than ingestion, which is very much an apples and oranges situation.
Fact is though, that here in Europe there is no need or value in adding this supplement, and generally the EU is wary of any adulterated foods without reason.
That's off by a factor of 1000x -- it says 10.3 milligrams.
In some cases these arguments are made in good faith.
In even rarer cases these arguments are true.
But initially it's wise to take them with a grain of salt.
"Iron deficiency isn't an issue, probably because there's lots of enriched foods, so let's stop enriching food!"
I think regulatory analysis requires a little more thought than that.
Furthermore, in many European nations the pasta is enriched, mainly with fiber although plenty of other nutrients are added depending on the brand and market. European countries just don't have regulations regarding "enriched macaroni" labeling like the US, which is an interesting historical quirk but irrelevant to what's actually in the pasta. Popular brands like Barilla are almost certainly enriched with something - depending on the size of the market it might have been enriched to American standards just to minimize manufacturing fragmentation (i.e. Italy, a huge consumer of pasta and origin of many of the brands will have formulas dedicated to that market, while Norway will receive whatever other formula is closest to their requirements).
Rather, it is (or was, originally) about protecting the brand of pasta noodles vs. ramen noodles, at a time when the difference was not as readily apparently to consumers.
It's the type of regulation that determines what is a "HD" tv, for example.
We don't need to wonder! They explain it right in the article: protectionism. It's not really that surprising that a lot of regulations have nothing to do with protecting the consumer and are all about protecting the parties that really matter to governments: big domestic industries.
> Around World War II, Carl explained, the established noodle industry (henceforth referred to as Big Pasta) was “upset” by the introduction of Nissin’s ramen noodles into the country, which were “completely out of spec” with what the United States then recognized as noodles — specifically because the ramen was being sold for a lower price and with what Carl called “lower standards” of nutrition. “They were really pressed,” said Carl. That’s when the “standards of identity” were created: Big Pasta made sure that all noodles had to meet certain specifications to be considered “enriched macaroni products” and sold in the United States.
In this case, the pasta industry did not want their product confused with the new noodles coming from Nissin; this was back in the days when many Americans may not have readily known the difference between pasta noodles and ramen noodles, and wondered why they were paying more for pasta than they could for ramen.
Now those rules might be perverted to suit protectionist goals, but that’s the whole art of effective hopefully minimalist regulation: it’s very hard to do.
Alternatively, it might be the fact that the pasta company in question was selling buccatini at a lower price, a competitor did an analysis, and they found that this company was saving money by skirting regulation that everyone else is complying with. And they did the right thing by forcing the FDA to apply the rules evenly to all companies.
Agreed. I'm not saying there's no rational underpinning to regulation, just that it's frequently gamed by bad actors, almost to the point that the original intent is forgotten.
Regulatory harmonisation is controversial though, especially here in UK. No matter that its usually boring stuff like agreeing fire retardant coatings on soft furnishings, the newspapers insisted this was a breach of sovereignty. Expect a new British safety standard (identical but with a different logo) to join the pack.
But then this one https://support.ce-check.eu/hc/en-us/articles/360008642600-H... says it's real, I'm confused.
Edit: I'm going to go through every single device/cable I have at home and examine the font and the arrangement of the two letters now, the C and the E need to be on two circles that overlap by exactly the width of the lines.
Also if you sell the "cheap crap" to some country outside of EU, you can still slap the nice CE logo there.
And since when shady Chinese companies care about copyrights anyway.
Maybe it's a lie that they tell themselves so they can sleep better at night. It's not unlike how "sovereign citizens" believe in various flawed legal arguments to justify how they don't have to pay taxes.
For example, Katsuobushi is the core part of Japanese food but it seems that exporting to Europe is difficult due to EU regulation. Another example in Japan would be K-car.
As a Japanese, I never want to give up Katuobushi for improving health. I suspect that maybe oppositely, European people also has food or culture that banned from other country .
https://www.nippon.com/en/views/b01723/
This also means that the European variants don't have to meet the kei-car regulations regarding size, engine capacity or power output, so some of them are a bit bigger or have more powerful engines.
Can we trust states with major pharmaceutical industries to regulate pharmaceuticals? Major car production centres to regulate emissions? Major chemicals companies to regulate chemicals?
I'd be a little suspicious, living next to such a country, if they insist on my adopting the regulations they wrote, which of course their industries all successfully meet to the letter.
It's true that they don't make much sense and that they often harm the consumer, but I vote in my regional politicians and in theory can vote them out if they impose standards I don't like.
One of the problems with Europe was the perceived lack of democratic control coupled with the dishonesty from anti_EU campaigners about things like straight bananas.
I don’t care for this, but I understand it. Rarely do we hear about the lives that were saved thanks to the regulatory body doing its job.
Even ignoring protectionism there are a billion different ways to make reasonable regulations and many of them will be incompatible in some ways.
Countries working together on regulations is a thing, but it also does slow down things and takes a lot of effort.
>Or vaccines. Why isn't there a global approval system?
I don't see any way how that could work out any better than the current situation.
Global systems are inherently more fragile, no? More eyes on something is always a good thing, less likely to be corrupted by corporate interests, etc...
Both USA and UK markets take steps to avoid salmonella. The method the USA requires the eggs to be refrigerated, the method the UK uses effectively requires that they are not (at least not until you get them home, once you start you can’t stop).
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/09/11/336330502/wh...
You get objections to GMO food in Europe while in the US this doesn't even have to be labelled.
Chocolate standards that mean most US chocolate cannot legally be called chocolate in Europe as it doesn't contain enough cocoa.
Chicken has to be chlorine washed in the US before sale, a practice that is prohibited in Europe.
Eggs in the US are washed before sale which makes it necessary to keep them in the fridge afterwards while in Europe eggs are nornally sold unwashed (in some countries (all EU?) It's even prohibited to wash them).
Let's not even talk standards for wine and raw milk cheese, use of corn syrup, regional denominations, slaughter and animal welfare rules, ...
Not easy to find a simple resolution to such strong differences in some sectors. Opposition to trade deals among Europeans usually stem from (1) fears of lower food standards (incl. animal welfare), (2) worries about slavery and labour exploitation and (3) worries about low environmental standars. I'm sure the US has similar recurring themes popping up.
People are using bucatini as eco-friendly straws, but uncooked pasta isn’t safe so the FDA temporarily blocked it or something.
Bucatini has good sauce absorption but imho its claim to fame is its thickness, mouthfeel, and rigidity, which the author hilariously and accurately refers to as "sentient". It has a mind of its own.
There are two similar noodle shapes, pici and Strozzapreti (literally "priest stranglers") but they are even harder to find.
Which is more likely:
Error 404: Bucatini not found.
MySQL Error: cannot get connection to deliver Bucatini.
/me shows self out
307 Temporary Redirect of Bucatini Deliveries
I'll have to check Hannaford and Shoprite instead.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t6ddIzPy0k
James Lord, biographer, to Alberto Giacometti, while watching the artist draw him: "It looks so easy." Giacometti: "It is easy. All it takes is a lifetime."
I bought the last box at Kroger somewhat intrigued. It took a bit longer than spaghetti to cook, and honestly I didn’t find it particularly interesting. Just a fat noodle that wasn’t particularly good at holding on to the sauce.
This journalist needs a journalist friend to help cover his story.
The point of the article is in the writing more than the actual subject matter.
That's around €3.60/kg, which is considered in Italy a quick way to get street riots. Go over €4/kg and you'll get a full blown revolution, complete with a fully functional guillotine.
In my local supermarket 500g of bucatini De Cecco come for €.99, which is around $1.22. I understand that pasta in considered a specialty on the other side of the pond, but it is still basically just (semolina) flour and water, and no matter how fancy it could be, it's outrageous to pay that much for something mass produced.
There were many better prices available, but I was just sanity checking the author who wrote lots and lots making it sound like her favorite pasta was unavailable. So I want trying to find an optimal prices just trying to see if it’s actually unavailable (it isn’t).
At my local market pasta is usually $.7-1/pound. And if I go to specialty markets or Whole Foods the price can get 2-5x higher.
Or the enrichment material supplier that the pasta-maker cut back on. Or pasta-maker switched flour suppliers to a cheaper under-enriched source.
But seriously, they do inspect a lot of drug manufacturing facilities, even overseas.
As a Canadian, I trust their approvals more than Health Canada's. I suspect Health Canda just copies whatever the FDA does a few weeks later.
Dunno why either haven't banned addictive substances (cigarettes) and let the non-addictive but fun ones get a free ride. But ya know.
Cooking Bucatini was proving too hard for me, and it doesn't drain well.
Pasta was my staple, but has become sometimes-food now, its too easy to put on weight.
De Niro is said to have wolfed down linguine to pork himself up for the La Motta role in "Raging Bull"
I largely prefer not enriched food, including salt. It just tastes better, IMHO.
But when gemelli disappeared for several months I was distraught. Nothing is better in mac'n'cheese.
I make it in a cake pan, less than an inch deep, with sourdough cubes and grated cheese on top, toasted to a crisp. The mac really is just there to hold up the cheese toast. But that doesn't stop me from putting in chopped chili peppers (not too much, 2 oz is plenty!), nutmeg, and a hint of cayenne.
Strozzapreti can substitute for gemelli, but it is even harder to find any of.
Basically take the pasta out of the water a few minutes early, put it in a pan with the sauce and some of the pasta cooking water, and finish cooking it there.
Important: as shared by other HN users, remember to put the pasta out of hot water a couple of minutes before the cooking time and stir it on a hot pan with the sauce for the last 2 minutes. Make sure to add also a few tablespoons of the hot (salted) water you used to cook the pasta, this helps to make the cream effect.
Guanciale is pretty much impossible to find outside of Italy, at least in regular supermarkets. I reckon it’s because nobody can pronounce it
The article also mentions trade groups pressuring the FDA to set arbitrary standards on pasta to keep out imports of Asian noodles.
The article fails to mention what the FDA calls Asian noodle products.
It calls them "alimentary paste."
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/alimentary
"Of, or relating to food, nutrition or digestion."
"Nourishing; nutritious."
(At least the first part; "extruded alimentary paste" would be a more precise description of noodles.)
The point is that calling any food product "alimentary paste" is hilariously unappetizing.
> make six or eight ounces of paste as No. 319, roll it to the thickness of a quarter of an inch, or a little more, put pudding-cloth in a basin, sprinkle some flour over it, lay in your paste, and then the meat, together with a few pieces of fat; when full put in three wineglasses of water; turn the paste over the meat, so as not to form a lump, but well closed; then tie the cloth
And who could resist paste pudding [2]?
[1] http://www.foodsofengland.co.uk/beefpudding.htm
[2] http://www.foodsofengland.co.uk/pastepudding.htm
http://www.letterology.com/2012/06/please-dont-eat-library-p...
Another classmate ate earthworms. I was so enraged by this that I tried to bite his ear off. Fortunately I did not succeed.
The French aliment simply means food, although it's not spoken very often in France. The word exists in English but it's quite rare and normally used in legal contexts like so many other words of French origin.
It must be made from wheat, but can be with or without eggs, and with or without dairy product. But it must be formed/extruded and dried.
TIL
That must be the lamest way of defining pasta I've ever heard. Whoever named it like that doesn't deserve italian pasta (/s)
That's how foreign languages work. In Polish "rower" means "a bicycle" because british company Rover sold them here first :) In Russian and Ukrainian vogzal means "train station" because there was a famous train station in Vauxhal :)
You can't be serious. Post proof.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vauxhall#In_the_Russian_langua...
Wait really?! I'm learning Polish and I was wondering about this.
Although, given the way things are going, it wouldn't surprise me if the word was now "шарпи."
Surprisingly, the art supply brand Caran d'Ache is from the Russian "карандаш" and not vice versa.
The Ukrainian for "pencil" simply comes from the word for the metal tin, which, like lead metal, was in use for styluses used in drawing before the discovery of graphite.
And pencil is "ołówek" (ołów = lead).
Citation?
The article doesn't mention "alimentary paste" anywhere, so your remark comes off as assertive, yet I couldn't find traceability to this term in what I believe to be the applicable federal statute[1].
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?node=pt21.2.139&rgn=di...