THE ANTI-PASTA MOVEMENT OF 1930
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When Italian futurists tried to ban Pasta in Italy. The outrageous crusade against the country’s most beloved carbohydrate.
Flavors and Knowledge
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A pasta vendor in Naples during the late 19th or early 20th century. Carlo Brogi, Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain
By Ellen Gutoskey
While speaking at a multi-course banquet in Milan on November 15, 1930, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti presented his fellow Italians with an incendiary call to action. Pasta, he said, was a “passéist food” that “[deluded people] into thinking it [was] nutritious” and made them “heavy, brutish,” “skeptical, slow, [and] pessimistic.” As such, pasta should be abolished and replaced with rice.