A lesson in marketing from Spaghetti Noodles
Shopping with my wife one day, we navigated the pasta aisle, and determined we needed to add some to our food storage (we eat a LOT of pasta).
Lessley instinctively grabbed spaghetti noodles. I disagreed with the choice of pasta selected, and asked why she wanted spaghetti. "Well, what if we want to make spaghetti?" she asked.
I proceeded to argue that you can mix any noodle with tomato sauce, but in the end, she bought the spaghetti.
So it got me thinking: Why in the world do we use spaghetti noodles?
Spaghetti noodles are horribly inefficient
Think about it, there are much better pastas out there to make marinara dishes out of, that have distinct advantages over spaghetti.
Spaghetti is sloppy and messy. It has to be cut, or wrapped around a fork to eat, which can be considered impolite by some. Even if you manage the stab-and-twirl maneuver, and get it wrapped around the fork, there's always that last 4 inches of noodle(s) that just won't wrap. No matter how many times you rotate, it just keeps slipping off, foiling your attempts at civilized eating.
So what do you do? You slurp, of course! You get as much of the swath of noodles as you can inside your mouth, and whatever is left outside, you slurp up.
I don't know how it works for you, but whenever I do this, I end up with WAY more sauce on my shirt than in my mouth, as the splash-back from the slurp sends micro drops of permanently-staining red-sauce all over my non-designer clothes.
And don't even try to eat it with meatballs (FYI: Spaghetti is never eaten with meatballs in Italy. That's solely an American creation). Trying to cut a chewable piece of meat off the ball without shooting if off the plate and onto your dining parter is tough enough. But getting spaghetti noodles in your mouth with it? Fuhgettaboutit.
Penne, farfalle, macaroni, gemelli and rotini are all sold in nearly every grocery store in America, and are far easier to eat. They're bite-size, fit more easily in a pot, and don't require any slurping for consumption.
Tradition drives us to consume a less efficient pasta
So why do we so instinctively grab spaghetti? My rabid curiousity wouldn't allow me to let the question go unanswered, so I did some research. Here's the gist of it:
A large majority of Italian immigrants to the US in the early part of the century came from the region of Campania, where spaghetti noodles were commonly eaten. Why those people chose them, I can't find, but suffice it to say, they brought their inconvenient pasta noodle tradition with them on the boat.
As these immigrants began to introduce their cuisine to the Americans, spaghetti noodles caught on. Macaroni was already here, but it was brought from the British, so mixing it with tomato sauce would have been like putting Mussolini and Churchill in the same carpool.
When women's magazines caught on, they had diverse recipes in them, and spaghetti was a common culinary inclusion.
(Here's where I got my info: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198607/pasta)
So, as a result, a generation of Americans in the 30s - 60s grew up thinking italian food consisted of watered-down tomato sauce with oregano and skinny, hard to eat noodles.
The best seller isn't necessarily the best product
There's a marketing lesson in all this. It's called behavioral decision-making. The aforementioned history lesson explains why we systemically abandon product research and analysis every time we buy spaghetti noodles.
And it's not uncommon. We all make habitual buying decisions. This means we just buy it. We don't even think about it, it's just what we do.
I know some of you out there are thinking, "But it's so fun to eat spaghetti! And don't you remember how cute it was in "Lady and the Tramp" when they both started eating the same noodle and ended up kissing?"
My answer: That was only cute to women, and give me pasta that doesn't require a special fork-maneuver to eat, and won't leave spatter on my shirt.
Lessley instinctively grabbed spaghetti noodles. I disagreed with the choice of pasta selected, and asked why she wanted spaghetti. "Well, what if we want to make spaghetti?" she asked.
I proceeded to argue that you can mix any noodle with tomato sauce, but in the end, she bought the spaghetti.
So it got me thinking: Why in the world do we use spaghetti noodles?
Spaghetti noodles are horribly inefficient
Think about it, there are much better pastas out there to make marinara dishes out of, that have distinct advantages over spaghetti.
Spaghetti is sloppy and messy. It has to be cut, or wrapped around a fork to eat, which can be considered impolite by some. Even if you manage the stab-and-twirl maneuver, and get it wrapped around the fork, there's always that last 4 inches of noodle(s) that just won't wrap. No matter how many times you rotate, it just keeps slipping off, foiling your attempts at civilized eating.
So what do you do? You slurp, of course! You get as much of the swath of noodles as you can inside your mouth, and whatever is left outside, you slurp up.
I don't know how it works for you, but whenever I do this, I end up with WAY more sauce on my shirt than in my mouth, as the splash-back from the slurp sends micro drops of permanently-staining red-sauce all over my non-designer clothes.
And don't even try to eat it with meatballs (FYI: Spaghetti is never eaten with meatballs in Italy. That's solely an American creation). Trying to cut a chewable piece of meat off the ball without shooting if off the plate and onto your dining parter is tough enough. But getting spaghetti noodles in your mouth with it? Fuhgettaboutit.
Penne, farfalle, macaroni, gemelli and rotini are all sold in nearly every grocery store in America, and are far easier to eat. They're bite-size, fit more easily in a pot, and don't require any slurping for consumption.
Tradition drives us to consume a less efficient pasta
So why do we so instinctively grab spaghetti? My rabid curiousity wouldn't allow me to let the question go unanswered, so I did some research. Here's the gist of it:
A large majority of Italian immigrants to the US in the early part of the century came from the region of Campania, where spaghetti noodles were commonly eaten. Why those people chose them, I can't find, but suffice it to say, they brought their inconvenient pasta noodle tradition with them on the boat.
As these immigrants began to introduce their cuisine to the Americans, spaghetti noodles caught on. Macaroni was already here, but it was brought from the British, so mixing it with tomato sauce would have been like putting Mussolini and Churchill in the same carpool.
When women's magazines caught on, they had diverse recipes in them, and spaghetti was a common culinary inclusion.
(Here's where I got my info: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198607/pasta)
So, as a result, a generation of Americans in the 30s - 60s grew up thinking italian food consisted of watered-down tomato sauce with oregano and skinny, hard to eat noodles.
The best seller isn't necessarily the best product
There's a marketing lesson in all this. It's called behavioral decision-making. The aforementioned history lesson explains why we systemically abandon product research and analysis every time we buy spaghetti noodles.
And it's not uncommon. We all make habitual buying decisions. This means we just buy it. We don't even think about it, it's just what we do.
I know some of you out there are thinking, "But it's so fun to eat spaghetti! And don't you remember how cute it was in "Lady and the Tramp" when they both started eating the same noodle and ended up kissing?"
My answer: That was only cute to women, and give me pasta that doesn't require a special fork-maneuver to eat, and won't leave spatter on my shirt.