The box looks the same. The ingredients sound the same. But the pasta no longer cooks the same, and the label gives you almost no way to understand why. Part 2 of What Food Should Cost.
Thank you Leni. I am English and was raised in a pasta free home, except for Alpha-getti for school aged lunches. I had no idea about any of this and found it fascinating. As a Nona-less person, I tend to buy the inexpensive pasta and rely on my wife or my youngest child to determine when pasta is ready to eat. I may change my buying habits based on your writing, because after all, as a senior, I am still very price conscious.
I shop the sales and stock up when the better brands are on sale. Barilla is a pretty good one that goes on sale fairly often. Lancia, although not as good as it used to be, is quite good, affordable, and goes on sale quite often. De Cecco costs a little more than either, but very much an Italian household pantry staple. Shrinkflation has hit all three, but Lancia the least. All three are readily available across Canada and why I’ve named them. If you happen to shop at Costco, the pastas they stock are quite good.
Last tips from a Nonna (because I am one). A rougher, more matte, slightly chalky-looking pasta is usually a better-built one. A sign of a premium pasta. A glassy, shiny, almost translucent surface is a sign of high heat dried pasta. Picking a pasta somewhere in the middle of the two extremes and you should be fine. There is a small bonus to buying better pasta, pasta made right with higher quality durum wheat semolina digests better than no name, Primo or similar. The glycemic load is easy on the body for people who have trouble with blood sugar spikes and the like. It will leave you feeling full for longer.
Thank you Nona Leni :). I have seen Barilla and Lancia, but not De Cecco. I have noticed that No Name pasta is made in Turkey, so one must wonder what they know about making good pasta. Primo and Unico are made by the same company so I hope they are similar in quality. My youngest son has a Nona-in-law, so I will chat with him and his wife about this.
Garofalo Organic Pasta: try it and see. It's "made in Italy", where the wheat flour is still the most reliable quality. Costco Canada sells it online, possibly also in its physical stores. I tried for years to find a pasta I liked, including asking at a tiny Italian grocery near me that cared about the food it sold. Nothing. I thought I might have to learn to make my own. Then I found Garofalo Organic, and I swear this is the real deal. I wouldn't recommend settling for their non-organic, and at Costco prices I'd guess it would still be reasonable. It's as delicious as pasta I had at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, and I never thought I'd say that about anything.
It is usually available at Costco. I stay well stocked up because occasionally it isn’t in stock. The price there is reasonable for what you get. In truth, it is comparable to the price of Barilla in grocery chains. We also have a couple of good small European independents where I can find it. It is good pasta.
It is funny you should say that because we have maybe a dozen actual owned and operated pasta companies. Italpasta — a pretty good pasta brand and Primo which isn’t just pasta. That primo does more than pasta is a good thing because, to be honest, I’ve never cared for their pasta. Grisspasta out of Quebec is pretty big as well…but I haven’t got much experience with their pasta. Used it once, in someone else’s kitchen with 3 of us sharing the cooking. The dinner came out great…with great company and no overdone pasta. I have to confess it was the Quebec cheese that was the show stopper that night!
Good point; I haven't tried Italpasta or the Quebec one. I don't know much about pasta either, except what I like. (Ha. Like art?) But there wasn't anything on my grocery store shelves that seemed worth going back for a second time, and without a tradition I didn't see the point. Then Chez Panisse showed me the difference, and then Garofalo gave me the option, and then your piece on the decline in Canadian pasta quality, along with the reality that Italian flour is a higher standard than ours - and that led to my comment.
I appreciate your writing about our food. I don't know anything more important. Well I do, but you know what I mean.
I know exactly what you mean. I don’t for a minute think everyone should become obsessed with pasta, but I think we’d all be better served by being more curious about our food landscape. Farm to processor to wholesale to retail and finally to our own kitchens.
Wow. I didn’t read this properly earlier. I’m glad I waited and re-read, because here are all the comments too. What sheer pleasure to read all this. All that skilful analysis all this time… and we discover you can cook too! And( now I’m going to show my age) I’m from a generation where it was often difficult to do both: be a brainiac AND a good cook. ( I know, I know they are definitely combined..but for me, it was one or the other, maybe neither!)
Anyway, I appreciate the skimpflation analysis here. But I so enjoyed the discussion about who makes the best pasta and why some brands take longer to cook and why the water gets cloudy and what it takes to put it all together.
Also, Quebec cheese. The best.
Thanks for the affirmation, from Leni and commenters, of the pleasures of food and kitchens and grandmothers and guests. This is civilization. Hope we can keep it healthy and strong.
I started making my own pasta sheets for lasagna and stuff with local 00 flour and fresh eggs. For the more robust stuff I buy nothing except pasta that comes from Italy, turned on a copper mould and the type of semolina, it’s origin plus the grade is clearly marked on the package.
This is why I was so pissed off last year when the trains went on strike in Canada right at harvest time. Semolina degrades in the silos at an alarmingly quick rate. So the farmers lost on the front end with revenue and consumers lost on the back end for all the reasons you stated in your essay. There is nothing more selfish than what the railway unions did at harvest time last year. And semolina was only one example. I’m not in disagreement with what they were asking for, more simply the time which they chose to put the brakes on. It was not the time to screw over our country.
What you are describing is exactly what ends up giving unions a bad name. You reminded me of my Mom and my Nonna arguing years ago about the proper way to store flour and the best ratios of flour grades depending on humidity. In our house flour was serious stuff and both were farm raised.
My grandma too. She had a “flour drawer” with a humidity gauge in it and those things weren’t all that easy to come by in the 50/60’s -unless you were farm raised.
She always told me she didn’t need “the damn thing” anyway, she could tell when she picked the flour out of her drawer and rubbed it in between her fingers how moist it was, and therefore how much water to add. It was already milled so there wasn’t much else she could do with it, right?
Ontario raised, so she didn’t make pasta. But she baked one hell of a pie crust.
Nice story. It really shows how much we’ve lost in the name of convenience. Your Grandma had a real intimate relationship with food, and you have drawn from what you saw and learned from her. I know that much of what I learned won’t really make into my grandchildren’s lives. Not in a big way. We remember tastes and textures that they would find too different, if not undesirable, compared to the tastes they have learned to find familiar and enjoyable. My kids certainly learned a lot from me, but so many foods and ingredients have changed. Some subtlety, some dramatically.
If the package provided the information, I don't know that many people would know how to read/interpret the information provided. At the moment you have all these influencers who look at ingredients and make a determination of what is good or not good but would see Sodium Chloride in the ingredients and say we should not eat it because it is a chemical even if this is the proper name for table salt.
I can see skimpflation and how it will impact quality and cost but I don't know if many people are equipped to gauge what is best. Is one type of oil better than another or when one product has the best flour but uses a cheaper oil than the other product or the salt content is higher. Unless you are very familiar with a product, read the labels intensively and you can keep track of the history, how would you know? There is no database of product contents to watch the evolution of these products. It is almost as if this should be graded by professionals.
I think you’ve put your finger on the real challenge. I don’t expect everyone to become a food scientist. People are busy, and safety isn’t the same thing as quality. What we need is information that’s meaningful and easy to compare, not pages of technical data.
We have Consumer Reports for appliances and cars. Maybe food needs something similar, backed by better labelling and independent evaluations of quality. Something.
I have to say, I am not comfortable with the trend we are relentlessly advancing. We gone past the processing for food preservation and convenience stage. We’ve been able to do that for a long time.
Now it feels like it’s all about getting the cheapest possible product to the consumer for the maximum profit possible. I don’t think people and their health come out ahead in that kind of food landscape.
You give the example of food but this is the same issue we have with other products, say appliances. The manufacturers are trying to reduce cost by making changes like using plastic instead of metal gears, something you would not know by looking at the product. Car parts for example will become an assembly of many parts where, for example, you can no longer change the bearing or a universal joint that failed, you need to purchase the whole assembly which is much more profitable for the company but you would not know that when you purchased the car. It is part of the planned obsolescence and the restrictions to repair by using special tools not available to anyone outside the Company’s network.
In Europe, there are now rules for the right to repair and new products are taken apart and given a score based on the quality of the components inside and the ability to be repaired in the future. Retailers need to display the score of the products.
Maybe this is something like that we could have for food where scores are printed on the package to provide some measurements on things you can’t see but that could lead to interpretations or manufacturers gaming the system to get higher scores and since agri-food businesses have more weight than consumers in North America, it may be a good attempt turning bad.
Europe is also forcing consumer electronics companies to use batteries that can be replaced, manufacturers can no longer glue the batteries inside the devices. There will be exceptions for very small things like ear phones.
I agree. Right to repair is a great example because it's really about transparency and giving consumers more control after the purchase. It's already a big issue in Canada, especially for farmers dealing with proprietary equipment and software locks. Food feels like the next frontier. We don't need a perfect scoring system, but we do need better ways to make changes in quality visible instead of expecting consumers to discover them only after dinner is on the table.
Don’t get me started about butter…. my last Christmas baking, something I have done for 7 decades, was a disappointment.
It is seasoned… no pun intended cooks that are questioning results and KNOW there is something off… while far too many younger people exist on takeout, those who are trying to emulate their Depression era grandmother’s lessons on food economies feel they are failing because those family recipes don’t turn out.
And as someone with agricultural roots…. what the heck happened to marketing eggs? In my youth there were strict size measurements… and back to those old family recipes that say 1 large egg? I go to the bother to buy decent eggs and the pkg may say large but it takes 3 to make what was once 1 large egg.
Thanks for writing this.
I am reminded of a sign in my grandfather’s office about the selling of oats. First class oats cost x and second class oats cost y but if one only considers cost alone then he is the rightful prey of he who would run them through the horse first… BUT we are paying for first class oats when we feel the necessity of eating well but we are getting a lot of what has been run through the horse… piled high.
😂 That sign is worth framing. I think you've hit on something important, too. Experienced cooks often know something has changed long before they can explain exactly what it is. They aren't imagining it, they're noticing subtle shifts in ingredients and manufacturing that recipes written decades ago never had to account for. That's exactly why I think we need better transparency around food quality, not just food safety. Seriously though, I feel for younger people. With experience, you know how to compensate or adapt when necessary. What to accept as a basic standard and what not. For younger people, the goal posts are constantly moving as they are trying to learn how to function well in the kitchen. That is terrible. Food is essential.
I have been so happy with the quality of food in Spain. The vegetables are gorgeous, and taste like it. The fruit too. And the fish, well there is literally no comparison. I don’t eat pasta. So I can’t discuss that. But in general the food just tastes better here.
I hear you. There is more to what makes food in Europe taste so good than just great cooks. I haven’t been back to Italy for quite a few years, and I definitely miss the food! Especially figs right off the tree! I’ve discussed the differences at length with family and friends overseas, we’ve speculated and argued about everything from seed varieties to soil composition. I just know you can’t compare it. Some things are shifting there too now. It is getting harder to get chicken that has that taste we remember from Nonna’s chicken broth soup from many years ago. It takes more work to find really good chicken.
I use de Cecco pasta, have found it consistent over the years. If it changes, not sure what I'd buy. 🙁
I keep my fingers crossed. But to be honest I find even De Cecco now releases way more starch into the water than it used to.
Yeah and I've noticed more recently that I have to deduct 3 - 4 minutes or so from the recommended cook time for al dente.
Natalie, you might try the Garofalo Organic Pasta. Costco has it and it's good.
I'll try some, thanks!
Science through storytelling. Cooking pasta will never be the same.
Thank you Leni. I am English and was raised in a pasta free home, except for Alpha-getti for school aged lunches. I had no idea about any of this and found it fascinating. As a Nona-less person, I tend to buy the inexpensive pasta and rely on my wife or my youngest child to determine when pasta is ready to eat. I may change my buying habits based on your writing, because after all, as a senior, I am still very price conscious.
I shop the sales and stock up when the better brands are on sale. Barilla is a pretty good one that goes on sale fairly often. Lancia, although not as good as it used to be, is quite good, affordable, and goes on sale quite often. De Cecco costs a little more than either, but very much an Italian household pantry staple. Shrinkflation has hit all three, but Lancia the least. All three are readily available across Canada and why I’ve named them. If you happen to shop at Costco, the pastas they stock are quite good.
Last tips from a Nonna (because I am one). A rougher, more matte, slightly chalky-looking pasta is usually a better-built one. A sign of a premium pasta. A glassy, shiny, almost translucent surface is a sign of high heat dried pasta. Picking a pasta somewhere in the middle of the two extremes and you should be fine. There is a small bonus to buying better pasta, pasta made right with higher quality durum wheat semolina digests better than no name, Primo or similar. The glycemic load is easy on the body for people who have trouble with blood sugar spikes and the like. It will leave you feeling full for longer.
Thank you Nona Leni :). I have seen Barilla and Lancia, but not De Cecco. I have noticed that No Name pasta is made in Turkey, so one must wonder what they know about making good pasta. Primo and Unico are made by the same company so I hope they are similar in quality. My youngest son has a Nona-in-law, so I will chat with him and his wife about this.
Unico is a hair or two better than Primo. Or perhaps I should say used to be. They have been off my list for a very long time.
My grandmother would have skipped the science and simply said - "The pasta is bad Kay. Get a different one." 😂
Happy Friday Leni
I hope you had a good week.
What can I say. In my world pasta is very serious business! Have a great weekend Neela!
Thank you so much Leni :)
Great information. Thank you. As usual, I learned something.👍🏻
Garofalo Organic Pasta: try it and see. It's "made in Italy", where the wheat flour is still the most reliable quality. Costco Canada sells it online, possibly also in its physical stores. I tried for years to find a pasta I liked, including asking at a tiny Italian grocery near me that cared about the food it sold. Nothing. I thought I might have to learn to make my own. Then I found Garofalo Organic, and I swear this is the real deal. I wouldn't recommend settling for their non-organic, and at Costco prices I'd guess it would still be reasonable. It's as delicious as pasta I had at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, and I never thought I'd say that about anything.
It is usually available at Costco. I stay well stocked up because occasionally it isn’t in stock. The price there is reasonable for what you get. In truth, it is comparable to the price of Barilla in grocery chains. We also have a couple of good small European independents where I can find it. It is good pasta.
Another example of having to buy European because our own Canadian standards are shortchanging us.
It is funny you should say that because we have maybe a dozen actual owned and operated pasta companies. Italpasta — a pretty good pasta brand and Primo which isn’t just pasta. That primo does more than pasta is a good thing because, to be honest, I’ve never cared for their pasta. Grisspasta out of Quebec is pretty big as well…but I haven’t got much experience with their pasta. Used it once, in someone else’s kitchen with 3 of us sharing the cooking. The dinner came out great…with great company and no overdone pasta. I have to confess it was the Quebec cheese that was the show stopper that night!
Good point; I haven't tried Italpasta or the Quebec one. I don't know much about pasta either, except what I like. (Ha. Like art?) But there wasn't anything on my grocery store shelves that seemed worth going back for a second time, and without a tradition I didn't see the point. Then Chez Panisse showed me the difference, and then Garofalo gave me the option, and then your piece on the decline in Canadian pasta quality, along with the reality that Italian flour is a higher standard than ours - and that led to my comment.
I appreciate your writing about our food. I don't know anything more important. Well I do, but you know what I mean.
I know exactly what you mean. I don’t for a minute think everyone should become obsessed with pasta, but I think we’d all be better served by being more curious about our food landscape. Farm to processor to wholesale to retail and finally to our own kitchens.
Wow. I didn’t read this properly earlier. I’m glad I waited and re-read, because here are all the comments too. What sheer pleasure to read all this. All that skilful analysis all this time… and we discover you can cook too! And( now I’m going to show my age) I’m from a generation where it was often difficult to do both: be a brainiac AND a good cook. ( I know, I know they are definitely combined..but for me, it was one or the other, maybe neither!)
Anyway, I appreciate the skimpflation analysis here. But I so enjoyed the discussion about who makes the best pasta and why some brands take longer to cook and why the water gets cloudy and what it takes to put it all together.
Also, Quebec cheese. The best.
Thanks for the affirmation, from Leni and commenters, of the pleasures of food and kitchens and grandmothers and guests. This is civilization. Hope we can keep it healthy and strong.
I started making my own pasta sheets for lasagna and stuff with local 00 flour and fresh eggs. For the more robust stuff I buy nothing except pasta that comes from Italy, turned on a copper mould and the type of semolina, it’s origin plus the grade is clearly marked on the package.
This is why I was so pissed off last year when the trains went on strike in Canada right at harvest time. Semolina degrades in the silos at an alarmingly quick rate. So the farmers lost on the front end with revenue and consumers lost on the back end for all the reasons you stated in your essay. There is nothing more selfish than what the railway unions did at harvest time last year. And semolina was only one example. I’m not in disagreement with what they were asking for, more simply the time which they chose to put the brakes on. It was not the time to screw over our country.
What you are describing is exactly what ends up giving unions a bad name. You reminded me of my Mom and my Nonna arguing years ago about the proper way to store flour and the best ratios of flour grades depending on humidity. In our house flour was serious stuff and both were farm raised.
My grandma too. She had a “flour drawer” with a humidity gauge in it and those things weren’t all that easy to come by in the 50/60’s -unless you were farm raised.
She always told me she didn’t need “the damn thing” anyway, she could tell when she picked the flour out of her drawer and rubbed it in between her fingers how moist it was, and therefore how much water to add. It was already milled so there wasn’t much else she could do with it, right?
Ontario raised, so she didn’t make pasta. But she baked one hell of a pie crust.
Nice story. It really shows how much we’ve lost in the name of convenience. Your Grandma had a real intimate relationship with food, and you have drawn from what you saw and learned from her. I know that much of what I learned won’t really make into my grandchildren’s lives. Not in a big way. We remember tastes and textures that they would find too different, if not undesirable, compared to the tastes they have learned to find familiar and enjoyable. My kids certainly learned a lot from me, but so many foods and ingredients have changed. Some subtlety, some dramatically.
If the package provided the information, I don't know that many people would know how to read/interpret the information provided. At the moment you have all these influencers who look at ingredients and make a determination of what is good or not good but would see Sodium Chloride in the ingredients and say we should not eat it because it is a chemical even if this is the proper name for table salt.
I can see skimpflation and how it will impact quality and cost but I don't know if many people are equipped to gauge what is best. Is one type of oil better than another or when one product has the best flour but uses a cheaper oil than the other product or the salt content is higher. Unless you are very familiar with a product, read the labels intensively and you can keep track of the history, how would you know? There is no database of product contents to watch the evolution of these products. It is almost as if this should be graded by professionals.
I think you’ve put your finger on the real challenge. I don’t expect everyone to become a food scientist. People are busy, and safety isn’t the same thing as quality. What we need is information that’s meaningful and easy to compare, not pages of technical data.
We have Consumer Reports for appliances and cars. Maybe food needs something similar, backed by better labelling and independent evaluations of quality. Something.
I have to say, I am not comfortable with the trend we are relentlessly advancing. We gone past the processing for food preservation and convenience stage. We’ve been able to do that for a long time.
Now it feels like it’s all about getting the cheapest possible product to the consumer for the maximum profit possible. I don’t think people and their health come out ahead in that kind of food landscape.
You give the example of food but this is the same issue we have with other products, say appliances. The manufacturers are trying to reduce cost by making changes like using plastic instead of metal gears, something you would not know by looking at the product. Car parts for example will become an assembly of many parts where, for example, you can no longer change the bearing or a universal joint that failed, you need to purchase the whole assembly which is much more profitable for the company but you would not know that when you purchased the car. It is part of the planned obsolescence and the restrictions to repair by using special tools not available to anyone outside the Company’s network.
In Europe, there are now rules for the right to repair and new products are taken apart and given a score based on the quality of the components inside and the ability to be repaired in the future. Retailers need to display the score of the products.
Maybe this is something like that we could have for food where scores are printed on the package to provide some measurements on things you can’t see but that could lead to interpretations or manufacturers gaming the system to get higher scores and since agri-food businesses have more weight than consumers in North America, it may be a good attempt turning bad.
Europe is also forcing consumer electronics companies to use batteries that can be replaced, manufacturers can no longer glue the batteries inside the devices. There will be exceptions for very small things like ear phones.
I agree. Right to repair is a great example because it's really about transparency and giving consumers more control after the purchase. It's already a big issue in Canada, especially for farmers dealing with proprietary equipment and software locks. Food feels like the next frontier. We don't need a perfect scoring system, but we do need better ways to make changes in quality visible instead of expecting consumers to discover them only after dinner is on the table.
This is a really interesting article!
Thank you.
Don’t get me started about butter…. my last Christmas baking, something I have done for 7 decades, was a disappointment.
It is seasoned… no pun intended cooks that are questioning results and KNOW there is something off… while far too many younger people exist on takeout, those who are trying to emulate their Depression era grandmother’s lessons on food economies feel they are failing because those family recipes don’t turn out.
And as someone with agricultural roots…. what the heck happened to marketing eggs? In my youth there were strict size measurements… and back to those old family recipes that say 1 large egg? I go to the bother to buy decent eggs and the pkg may say large but it takes 3 to make what was once 1 large egg.
Thanks for writing this.
I am reminded of a sign in my grandfather’s office about the selling of oats. First class oats cost x and second class oats cost y but if one only considers cost alone then he is the rightful prey of he who would run them through the horse first… BUT we are paying for first class oats when we feel the necessity of eating well but we are getting a lot of what has been run through the horse… piled high.
😂 That sign is worth framing. I think you've hit on something important, too. Experienced cooks often know something has changed long before they can explain exactly what it is. They aren't imagining it, they're noticing subtle shifts in ingredients and manufacturing that recipes written decades ago never had to account for. That's exactly why I think we need better transparency around food quality, not just food safety. Seriously though, I feel for younger people. With experience, you know how to compensate or adapt when necessary. What to accept as a basic standard and what not. For younger people, the goal posts are constantly moving as they are trying to learn how to function well in the kitchen. That is terrible. Food is essential.
I have been so happy with the quality of food in Spain. The vegetables are gorgeous, and taste like it. The fruit too. And the fish, well there is literally no comparison. I don’t eat pasta. So I can’t discuss that. But in general the food just tastes better here.
I hear you. There is more to what makes food in Europe taste so good than just great cooks. I haven’t been back to Italy for quite a few years, and I definitely miss the food! Especially figs right off the tree! I’ve discussed the differences at length with family and friends overseas, we’ve speculated and argued about everything from seed varieties to soil composition. I just know you can’t compare it. Some things are shifting there too now. It is getting harder to get chicken that has that taste we remember from Nonna’s chicken broth soup from many years ago. It takes more work to find really good chicken.
Labelling laws need to change immediately.