Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Is There a Bucatini Shortage in America?

grubstreet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 333 posts

Re: Why Is There a Bucatini Shortage in America?

#321

Post by estaseuropano »

jldugger wrote: post #36
Scoundreller wrote: post #26

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…

> 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 perha…

Iodine in salt is also normal in Europe. I think mandatory in at least a few countries, possibly the whole EU.

Re: Why Is There a Bucatini Shortage in America?

#322

Post by estaseuropano »

Scoundreller wrote: post #26
mewse-hn wrote: post #6

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…

Different doesn't mean one is better or worse.

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.

Re: Why Is There a Bucatini Shortage in America?

#323

Post by andybak »

saagarjha wrote: post #320
dcolkitt wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find that a law specifying in exact numbers what a product should contain in order to qualify for a label to be a very good law. Good in theory. But it's also likely to slow down innovation or even kill it in its tracks. Maybe a producer wants to mix up the ingredients because they're making a substandard product. But maybe they discovered a way to deliver higher quality or lower price with an iteration on the or…

It’s a notebook computer, duh

I've never heard a normal person ever use the phrase "notebook computer".

Re: Why Is There a Bucatini Shortage in America?

#324

Post by qalmakka »

dnhz wrote: post #246
qalmakka wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 20 pounds of pasta for $40 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 (semol…

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.

Re: Why Is There a Bucatini Shortage in America?

#325

Post by thomasahle »

jiofih wrote: post #250
pksebben wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's this strange cultural divide in the US, and it's not a republican-Democrat thing or a gender thing or a race thing. People from certain cliques are more comfortable with snark, self deprecation, and the sort of hyperbolic lampooning that this article engaged in (I'm in this camp), whereas others read snobbery and cruelty and such from identical sources (and I'm fairly certain the author is not implying they a…

> I'm fairly certain the author is not implying they are better than anyone because of their love for 'the best pasta' That’s the thing - I am sure they (and the readers) do feel superior for their choice of pasta - or something equally pedestrian, it is what makes the whole “hyperbolic lampooning” work - it wouldn’t be funny if didn’t have a vein of truth. That’s off-putting, maybe because we cant identify with that…

> I am sure they (and the readers) do feel superior for their choice of pasta

I find that likely as well - that the author really feels some superiority over the pedestrian spagetti - but then they started shaming orecchiette and satire becomes the most likely explanation.

Re: Why Is There a Bucatini Shortage in America?

#326

Post by sunpar »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #283
sunpar wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think most of the governmental functions in this article worked quite well. Told another way, a firm in the marketplace for pasta found that a competitor was out of regulation with their product, and they found a person in congress who could press a slow-moving and ineffective agency to do better at doing their job: enforcing said regulations. That's exactly what you want your elected representatives to do…

> I actually think most of the governmental functions in this article worked quite well. Permit me indulge in a minor rant. Not against you, just generally. A specialty pasta manufacturer in Italy (home of pasta, but what do they know?) can no longer export a specialty pasta (which they sell legally in Italy), because it's marginally under-enriched by US government standards for pasta, and so the consumers in the US,…

>you'll find a dozen people to complain that you're nothing but an eeeevil capitalist who would poison our oceans and black out our skies just to make an extra $3.50 in pocket change, if not simply out of spite generally.

I wouldn't be one of those people, trust me. I won't go into what my line of work is, but suffice to say I may actually be one of those evil capitalists.

I DO think this is one of those cost-of-doing-business type of things when it comes to international trade. I think most consumers appreciate that when they go and buy something that labels itself "pasta", it conforms to some standard that we can agree is reasonable. Otherwise, you'll likely have someone who stuffs ramen noodles into a pasta package and sells it to some suckers. And now we all have to always know which are the "real" pasta brands and which are the fakes(yes, that might be easy enough to do, but it's the overall cognitive load of having to do that with every product that should concern us). That's just an example, but that's why the regulations exist.

And you can't just say "well they sell this in Italy, and that's the home of pasta, so c'mon man this can't be right", because Italy I'm sure has like 3x more regulations around pasta selling (a cursory google search shows this is likely true), and any change they make to their regulation will keep in mind the interests of their consumers and their producers. They will not be thinking of American interests when making those regulations.

Finally, it's worth keeping in mind that this one company that was recently restricted for not being in compliance is NOT the only manufacturer of Bucatini, and in fact may not be the largest or best manufacturer either. It's just one company that returned the reporter's calls and had an answer for them.

Re: Why Is There a Bucatini Shortage in America?

#327

Post by evgen »

ThePowerOfFuet wrote: post #301
sam_goody wrote: post #97

The writing style is awesome, I literally laughed out loud. Beyond that, the article reminds us that in every industry there are powerful actors that protect their monopoly, and will coerce the government into helping them. I read an article about import taxes on sugar that were created to keep out competition, and as a result everything uses corn syrup. Other examples abound. Unfortunately, the solution of governmen…

The taxes on sugar were to prop up the (heavily subsidized) US corn industry. Why do you think they even water down the gasoline with it? There's so much of it, and it's so artificially cheap, and they want to keep demand high to keep the farmers happy.

The taxes on sugar have nothing to do with corn. Corn producers do not need HFCS to stay in business, they have ethanol when they need a subsidy; less than 5% of US production goes to HFCS, but the rest is basically split 50/50 between animal feed and ethanol.

Sugar imports are taxed so that US producers (cane in FL & LA, sugar beets in the upper midwest and upper great plains states) do not have to compete with cane sugar from Brazil and Mexico. It is as simple as that.

Re: Why Is There a Bucatini Shortage in America?

#329

Post by neltnerb »

splonk wrote: post #294
neltnerb wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Why Is There a Bucatini Shortage in America?

#330

Post by NullPrefix »

ajuc wrote: post #167
NullPrefix wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In Russian and Ukrainian vogzal means "train station" because there was a famous train station in Vauxhal You can't be serious. Post proof.

There's competing theories but all come from Vauxhall. Either train station or gardens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vauxhall#In_the_Russian_langua...

Thanks
Post reply on HN