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The article mentions the fact that the FDA calls all legal pasta "enriched macaroni."

The article also mentions trade groups pressuring the FDA to set arbitrary standards on pasta to keep out imports of Asian noodles.

The article fails to mention what the FDA calls Asian noodle products.

It calls them "alimentary paste."



> enriched macaroni

That must be the lamest way of defining pasta I've ever heard. Whoever named it like that doesn't deserve italian pasta (/s)


And awkward as hell too. Maccheroni is a shape of pasta, but apparently all pasta is "enriched macaroni" in the US?


Kiełbasa and Pierogi are whole classes of products but in US kiełbasa is a particular kind of Polish sousage and pierogi basically means ruskie pierogi.

That's how foreign languages work. In Polish "rower" means "a bicycle" because british company Rover sold them here first :) In Russian and Ukrainian vogzal means "train station" because there was a famous train station in Vauxhal :)


Another fun one: the word for "marker" (i.e., a felt-tipped pen for drawing) is "фломастер," from the brand Flo-Master.

Although, given the way things are going, it wouldn't surprise me if the word was now "шарпи."

Surprisingly, the art supply brand Caran d'Ache is from the Russian "карандаш" and not vice versa.

The Ukrainian for "pencil" simply comes from the word for the metal tin, which, like lead metal, was in use for styluses used in drawing before the discovery of graphite.


In Polish: "flamaster" (thin marker for writing) vs "marker" (thick semitransparent marker for highlighting text).

And pencil is "ołówek" (ołów = lead).


>In Polish "rower" means "a bicycle" because british company Rover sold them here first

Wait really?! I'm learning Polish and I was wondering about this.


>In Russian and Ukrainian vogzal means "train station" because there was a famous train station in Vauxhal

You can't be serious. Post proof.


There's competing theories but all come from Vauxhall. Either train station or gardens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vauxhall#In_the_Russian_langua...


Thanks


"Macaroni" is a very old synonym for "pasta". It used to have a different broader meaning than the shape.


In (Brazilian) Portuguese, all pasta is called "macarrão", no doubt from the old Italian word


To add a couple more examples; in polish "Makaron" is all pasta (same as above), while in German "Nudeln" (noodles) is also synonymous with all pasta (even maccaroni!).


E.g. the French "macaron" comes from this Italian word.


Probably a case of semantic narrowing.


Yes. Spaghetti is a type of enriched macaroni, according to the FDA.


Fitting for a yankee doodle dandy, though.


> It calls them "alimentary paste."

Citation?

The article doesn't mention "alimentary paste" anywhere, so your remark comes off as assertive, yet I couldn't find traceability to this term in what I believe to be the applicable federal statute[1].

[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?node=pt21.2.139&rgn=di...


A google search with terms like site:fda.gov alimentary paste might help. The person you're responding to is not making this up.


That must be a formal legal term, although it is certainly appropriate:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/alimentary

"Of, or relating to food, nutrition or digestion."

"Nourishing; nutritious."

(At least the first part; "extruded alimentary paste" would be a more precise description of noodles.)


The point isn't whether the word "alimentary" means anything. You probably know related words like "alimony." (Tangentially, the humorous novel Through the Alimentary Canal with Gun and Camera is a surprising early precursor to Fantastic Voyage and related stories of microscopic explorers inside the human body.)

The point is that calling any food product "alimentary paste" is hilariously unappetizing.


'Paste' is an old word for pastry, too. It makes old recipes rather odd sounding [1]:

> make six or eight ounces of paste as No. 319, roll it to the thickness of a quarter of an inch, or a little more, put pudding-cloth in a basin, sprinkle some flour over it, lay in your paste, and then the meat, together with a few pieces of fat; when full put in three wineglasses of water; turn the paste over the meat, so as not to form a lump, but well closed; then tie the cloth

And who could resist paste pudding [2]?

[1] http://www.foodsofengland.co.uk/beefpudding.htm

[2] http://www.foodsofengland.co.uk/pastepudding.htm


When I was a kid, one of my classmates loved to eat library paste:

http://www.letterology.com/2012/06/please-dont-eat-library-p...

Another classmate ate earthworms. I was so enraged by this that I tried to bite his ear off. Fortunately I did not succeed.


Fun fact: "pasta" literally means "paste" in Italian (and most languages from Latin).


As does the French pâté. And yet, in English, they suggest very different foods.


Pasta, pastry, paste, pasty. All related words. The French for pastry is pâte. Pâté means "pasted" as in "pasted fish".

The French aliment simply means food, although it's not spoken very often in France. The word exists in English but it's quite rare and normally used in legal contexts like so many other words of French origin.


The Dutch word 'tandapasta' has always amused me no end. (toothpaste)


Just ‘tandpasta’ :)


Related: the part of cheese that's not the rind is called the paste.


It is apparently a more precision definition for noodle (it's a historical term, _pasta alimentaria_) https://www.britannica.com/topic/pasta

It must be made from wheat, but can be with or without eggs, and with or without dairy product. But it must be formed/extruded and dried.

TIL




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