National Pasta Day

Italy's answer arrived as statute. Law No 580 of 4 July 1967 reserved the industrial manufacture of dry pasta to durum wheat alone, and it was not a loose principle. The law barred the sale in Italy of pasta whose characteristics differed from the ones it laid down, and pushed that prohibition out to imported pasta as well.

The same law left two doors open. Common wheat was allowed for the small scale preparation of fresh pasta meant to be eaten straight away, and for pasta made to be shipped abroad. A country that had reserved the word for one grain was already using it for two.

What survived was the half that pointed inward. The Court said plainly that Community law did not require the legislature to repeal the rule for pasta producers established on Italian territory, and ten years later Parliament put the same line into statute, disapplying the 1967 law's ingredient, composition and labelling provisions to food lawfully made and marketed elsewhere in the Union or the European Economic Area. The decree that governs Italian pasta today keeps the prohibition on soft wheat flours in dry pasta and meets imported blends with a naming rule instead of a ban.

The American day sits at a distance from all of it. Nothing found records who put National Pasta Day on October 17, or when, and the trade association that speaks for the American industry runs a month rather than a day.