191–200 of 333 posts
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And awkward as hell too. Maccheroni is a shape of pasta, but apparently all pasta is "enriched macaroni" in the US?
"Macaroni" is a very old synonym for "pasta". It used to have a different broader meaning than the shape.
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.
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…
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…
Having clear [communication of] regulations that food importers could understand, and expect to be enforced in a consistent way that didn't require a lobbying arm, would work a lot better.
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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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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
> "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...
Is cappellini not commonly available in the states?
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I really want some now, too. :/
Yeah, with the amount they talked about extra sauce absorption in the article, I now have a very strong desire to try it myself...
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.
Semi related: there was a major shift in pasta market during 2004 EU extension. To comply with EU regulations, companies from newly joining countries had to invest large sums to switch to a different type of wheat to keep producing. Malma (biggest Polish pasta company) took a big credit for this, unfortunately they took it in a subsidiary of an Italian bank, whose CEO was also a chairman of Barilla. The bank soon dem…
The Rule of Unintended Consequences rears its ugly head.
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That’s not the history I’m familiar with regarding sugar tariffs. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-12-18/u-s-su... It’s very amusing to me that the US subsidized domestic sugar production, and then also pays for diabetes and it’s related healthcare costs. I’m confident that the future will look back and determine sugar to be one of the most costly habits of people.
You linked to an opinion piece that doesn't cite anything. It criticizes that there are broad staple food import tariffs, but does not discuss the purpose of these policies, which is national food security. The US has not experienced a food shortage, despite the normal incidence of crop failures in over a hundred years. The fact that Americans suffer from food oversupply is absolutely a first world problem.
https://ksr.hkspublications.org/2016/03/18/sweet-nothings-th...