I loved the original article, and (spoiler) it pretty much turned out to be what was posited but they're not sure why the iron levels were low. In the way these things usually go, they decided destroying the withheld US stocks was cheaper than shipping it elsewhere for sale or (illegally?) feeding the needy.
I'm wondering though, is fortification/enrichment in staples widespread? The US seems to do it a lot, but I checked in Australia and I can find only 2 cases of mandatory fortification[0] - Vitamin D for oil spreads (e.g. margarine) and vitamin B1 and folic acid for bread flour, and iodised salt in the bread. I suppose you can also include fluoridated tap water as fortification. I don't have either of those foods that often so hopefully I'm getting these nutrients elsewhere.
Illegally feeding the needy could well get your certifications to produce food revoked. Food is highly regulated, and by more agencies than I would have guessed. Food and Drug Administration, US Department of Agriculture (meat and eggs), plus various state agencies.
Rather than going to a landfill, they may have been delivered to a farm as food for pigs, but I imagine opening hundreds of thousands of boxes wouldn't be economically viable.
I work in food manufacturing. The opinions are my own and do not represent my employer.
Disclosures are never an issue until they are, by someone who feels you were disingenuous in the discussion, or your current/former employer has a problem with what you said.
I don't throw the disclosure on every single comment, but it's stated on my profile, and I do commonly add it when discussing industries I've been involved with.
I see the disclosures here fairly frequently and rather appreciate the forthrightness because they’re reminders of the ethos here and they also give a perspective and context to the rest of the comment.
Sorry for the meta thread, also interested in the answer to the root comment here about food fortification.
Studies have suggested that vitamin supplements may not do a great job at improving health outcomes.
I wonder how adding vitamins and minerals to food compares to taking a supplement with and without a meal in terms of vitamin and miner absorption rates?
I am italian living abroad... and De Cecco is the only pasta that you can consistently find that does not cook to a mish mash
Can you find better? Yes of course, also from the same small village in Abruzzo Fara San Martino (see Cocco), or most of the produce from Gragnano, or Rummo (from Benevento).
But among the really commercial ones, not many are better than De Cecco, and even if they are, they are very difficult to find
Btw I am biased: my grandmother was from Fara San Martino
I exclusively cook with cocco, to me it's miles beyond the competition but also a lot more expensive than rummo or de cecco. Haven't don't any direct comparisons between rummo and cocco, would you say the quality is similar?
In my opinion Rummo is more commercial than Cocco, and despite being a very valid product, doesn't have the same quality.
Basically Cocco bought the old bronze machinery from De Cecco, when it still was a relatively small family business and not the huge company that it is today, and keeps using them... with an overhead that justifies the premium (if you like good pasta).
Anyhow, as I said, I mostly cook with De Cecco because it's easy to find in the supermarket, sometimes I go to an Italian shop that's close to where I live, and buy some artisanal pasta, and on rare occasions on holidays, I make home-made pasta (tagliatelle or pasta alla chitarra, and ragù as a sauce... it's really not that difficult, and it tastes much better than anything you can buy)
> it's really not that difficult, and it tastes much better than anything you can buy
I agree that it's not that difficult to make, but I would argue that it's not necessarily much better in every case.
As my chief witness I enter Marcella Hazan. The late doyenne of Italian Cuisine.
In "The Classic Italian Cook Book: The Art of Italian Cooking and the Italian Art of Eating" she has more to say on the subject, but in short and from [1]:
"Although some types of pasta, like tagliatelle, are best made fresh at home, others, like spaghetti, should be bought dried. Pasta should be matched carefully to sauce."
I think that's the key. It really depends on the type of pasta and the sauce used.
That said: There's no doubt that ragu with freshly made tagliatelle is something devine.
I grew up in Italy but I live now in Spain.
If there's something I understood from living in Italy is that food in Italy is not only food, but also a container of bias and emotional investments.
Regarding food, people really take sides and hardly consider alternatives.
On the other side, probably this is the reason why it's quite hard to find mediocre food in Italy.
Yes, you are right about this and tourist traps are a global phenomenon.
In Barcelona, for instance, in places where tourists don't go, restaurants might be really bad, which never happened to me in Italy.
There's also a culture for keeping food as a family/friends value, which I don't see everywhere else.
Voiello make pretty decent linguine or spaghetti.
Never tried any other shape from them.
La Molisana is also OK among the commercial ones.
But if you have the chance to find it, you should try some pasta from Gragnano, they normally have pretty small businesses, so it is not so easy to find abroad.
Agnesi seems ok and is available here in out-of-the-way Brazil. De Cecco seems fine but is typically more expensive for reasons unknown to me. Barilla is also sometimes present here. Most brazilian brands don't or won't use hard wheat, though the local preference is for mushy pasta, so I don't know if this is cause or effect
As far as I can tell the rules apply only to imports, because they were explicitly designed to keep foreign noodles (ramen etc) from encroaching on "pasta".
As far as I'm aware, they're not legally required to fortify, but once it's labeled as "enriched macaroni product," it has to meet the required levels from the standard.
This isn't unique to imports: standards of identity apply equally to domestic products. It's just that the FDA has tools at its disposal to block things at the border, which they used here.
I certainly could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I'm not.
There's a standard for both "enriched macaroni product" and just "macaroni product." I don't believe anything requires you to choose the enriched one, other than the fact that doing any enrichment kicks you over to the "enriched" standard and you're then locked into at least a list of several mandatory enrichments.
Some states have laws requiring enrichment of flour, bread, pasta, etc. though, and that I think is what's happening with even importers opting for enrichment: it's necessary to have access to a nationwide market.
This... is just De Cecco piggy-backing on the buzz from the original article to do some self-promotion, isn't it?
Q: "Can you speculate on who reported your product to the regulators?"
A: "De Cecco is committed to providing consumers with the highest quality of pasta product. We do not wish to speculate on this topic."
Q: "Why was your pasta deficient in iron?"
A: "De Cecco is committed to providing consumers with the highest quality of pasta product. We do not know."
Q: "How soon can we expect to see your pasta in stock again?"
A: "De Cecco is committed to providing consumers with the highest quality of pasta product. Some time in the future! We look forward to seeing you in the kitchen!"
To be fair they answered to that and it was quite interesting, it's just some American (and Israeli, and Tanzanian) idiosyncrasy. In other markets they cannot even sell modified pasta.
Here's the actual answer from the interview: "To be honest, I don’t know. [...] It’s a really immaterial divergence compared to the metrics, the range. [...] I don’t have any facts to substantiate that, but to your question, why we had this problem with bucatini, I think it’s the shape — but we don’t know."
Why wouldn’t you be able to sell that in Italy or elsewhere?
GC: The short answer is that the vitamin-enriched pasta can be sold only in the U.S. market and some other countries like Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, Israel, etc., as far as I know. As to the iron-deficient bucatini, we concluded it was economically less burdensome to destroy the items here in the U.S.
I read that as the reporter repeatedly asking the same question in hopes of getting something exciting, and the rep repeatedly giving the same non-answer because he didn't know the real answer. It's not so much "piggy-backing on the buzz" as "my job is to say positive things about the product, which I will do in every sentence, but I have no more information to give you".
I found both articles to be underwhelming. Other brands sell this pasta shape, correct? At no point did bucatini sell out from Eataly
For example.
It was a fun headline of course and clearly one type of the pasta was not available, but “great shortage” was taking more than a little license. I guess it was more tongue in cheek than I initially understood?
My personal experience is that I have been having a hell of time finding bucatini. I live the in the East Bay. I once went to 5 grocery stores (Berkeley Bowl, Monterrey Market, Safeway, Andronicos, and local italian market) all of which had NO bucatini.
I just thought it had gone out of fashion and no one was stocking it. This article was very enlightening.
I would not have gone shopping for it without the article pointing me to its existence, but I couldn't find it at any of my local stores. If Eataly has it, I might have to brave the elements and pay too much for it, just to try it! ;-)
If you’re near the Eataly in the Financial District I had no problem finding some at Jubilee’s on John St a bit East from there after reading the original article.
I haven’t tried the Bucatini yet but I did enjoy the Brooklyn made bronze extruded pasta I bought.
At six and seven dollars a pound though it sure well better be good.
At no point have I had an issue finding buccatini at my local large chain grocery store. This chain is Kroger owned so if you have a Kroger or Kroger owned chain nearby I suggest looking there. The Wikipedia entry for Kroger lists the many chains across the country which they own.
"Why was iron low?"
"We don't know."
"It's better now?"
"Yes we fixed it!"
If they don't know what's wrong, how did they know what to fix? This is still fishy to me. Also, shame on the author for using the term "ratted out" when this company was selling a substandard product to Americans.
Those "standards" likely don't mean very much. As the original article (from December) points out, the standards were developed in the 1940s to make it harder for Japanese noodles to compete, not because of any real nutritional lack. People in other countries eat pasta that doesn't meet American "standards" and they seem to do just fine.
If you read the original article it tries for a long time to figure this requirement out and it's just arbitrary and apparently rarely ever checked (so also not checked for other pasta products, imported or not). The requirement also doesn't match those in other countries, e.g. in the EU you probably can't sell this product as its not allowed to be enriched (same as all US products have to black out their ridiculous and evidence-free health claims when selling in the EU; any "American food" section will have stickers over these parts of the packaging).
So while you are technically correct that the product is substandard, you could well argue that the issue is the arbitrary standard rather than the actual product.
My understanding is that there’s nothing objectively substandard about it - this is an arbitrary protectionist trade regulation that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
> If they don't know what's wrong, how did they know what to fix?
Pure speculation, but for example if they did design a process to enrich their pasta with iron, tested it initially, but then never tested it again (who cares if there's iron in pasta...), and then it stopped working for some reason (or possibly never worked reliably in the first place). And then instead of trying to find out what made this process not work, they just came up with a new process that did work.
As I said, it's speculation.
Another option is of course "I perfectly know, but I cannot tell you, because if I did, we'd be in legal trouble".
I'm wondering though, is fortification/enrichment in staples widespread? The US seems to do it a lot, but I checked in Australia and I can find only 2 cases of mandatory fortification[0] - Vitamin D for oil spreads (e.g. margarine) and vitamin B1 and folic acid for bread flour, and iodised salt in the bread. I suppose you can also include fluoridated tap water as fortification. I don't have either of those foods that often so hopefully I'm getting these nutrients elsewhere.
0: https://www.foodstandards.gov.au/consumer/nutrition/vitamina...