When: October 25
World Pasta Day on October 25th celebrates the food that is simultaneously ancient and modern, simple and technically demanding. Pasta's origin is one of food history's most contested questions, its regional Italian diversity is extraordinary, and its global spread has produced adaptations that range from authentic to bizarre.
Italy consumes 28 kilograms of pasta per person per year — making Italians the world's biggest pasta consumers, approximately three times the per-capita consumption of the United States.
World Pasta Day is observed by over 40 countries annually, which makes it one of the most globally distributed single-food holidays — a result of pasta's status as the most successful food export in culinary history. The form is Italian by development; the appetite for it is apparently universal. Pasta's Italian origin is more complex than the Marco Polo myth suggests. Arab traders documented pasta production in Sicily in 1154 — before Marco Polo left for China — and the form spread from the island to mainland Italy through the 11th and 12th centuries. The specific contribution of durum wheat was Italian and Mediterranean: a high-protein, hard wheat that grew well in the south and produced a dough with enough gluten to be rolled thin, dried, shipped, and cooked without disintegrating. The ability to dry pasta and store it made it a commercial product in a way that fresh pasta couldn't be, and Genoa was exporting it by the 14th century. The fresh versus dried distinction still defines...