31–40 of 333 posts
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"
> “FDA is quite slow to take action involving standards violations. I’m speculating that a competitor put some heavy pressure on FDA,” Or the enrichment material supplier that the pasta-maker cut back on. Or pasta-maker switched flour suppliers to a cheaper under-enriched source.
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 Eu…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The straw theory doesn’t make physical sense. It would take a week to drink a soda through a noodle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Eu…
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 woul…
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).
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 Eu…
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.
> “FDA is quite slow to take action involving standards violations. I’m speculating that a competitor put some heavy pressure on FDA,” Or the enrichment material supplier that the pasta-maker cut back on. Or pasta-maker switched flour suppliers to a cheaper under-enriched source.
Which makes me wonder what exactly the FDA is doing if it doesn't regularly test food for quality and safety?
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.
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 Eu…
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... "
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.
The curse-blessing of getting to the top of HN has jumped the digital-physical barrier. Which is more likely: Error 404: Bucatini not found. MySQL Error: cannot get connection to deliver Bucatini. /me shows self out