Italy: Stretching Spaghetti

While the Common Market is having its trouble agreeing on common tariff policy, one export seems to be welcome everywhere. For some reason, perhaps better left to psychologists and cooks, Europe is taking to a food that has long been largely an Italian preserve: pasta. Though Italians are still the heartiest eaters (66 lbs. per year), Italy’s pasta exports have risen 1,400% in a decade, crossing practically all national borders. of Paolo Agnesi & Sons, Italy’s oldest pasta maker and (with $10 million annual sales) one of its largest. Anticipating a 50% increase in exports this year, Agnesi has just opened a milling plant that processes 600,000 lbs. of grain daily for 75 varieties of pasta. It is the largest plant of its kind in Europe.

Only by Fork. The 140-year-old family-owned Agnesi company is a heterogeneous blend of old and new. The new plant, so automated that only three men handle all milling operations, sits among old buildings in Imperia, 80 miles southwest of Genoa. Surrounded by hills and served by a wheezing one-track railroad and the winding two-lane Via Aurelia, a relic of the Roman Empire, Agnesi’s Imperia businessmen air-freight their goods to Scandinavia more easily than they can ship it to Rome. From their isolated offices, they ring up the highest long-distance telephone bills in Italy. Third-generation Family Head Paolo Agnesi, 93, who wears handlebar mustaches and goatee, for 76 years has arrived at the plant with his laborers at 6 a.m. His grandnephew, Paolo, 24, recently returned home from New York’s Syracuse University, where he studied computer applications to spaghetti-making.

In the new Italian mass market, which has tempted some businessmen to stretch olive oil with water and parmigiano cheese with sawdust, the Agnesis steadfastly insist on quality. Their spaghetti is made only from expensive durum wheat; lately it has become even more expensive because the company began importing U.S. and Canadian wheat when demand outran Italian supplies. But Agnesi spaghetti also sells for more, and proud Nonagenarian Paolo further insists that it be consumed correctly—with only a fork and with as little sauce as possible. Shocked when he heard that Germans were eating spaghetti as a side dish to sausage, Agnesi dispatched Imperia’s best chef to the Munich trade fair to cook up 35,000 servings and teach the Hausfrauen their spaghetiquette. Germany is now the company’s second biggest export market, after Switzerland.

Scoop, Slurp & Chop. Looking beyond Europe, the Agrnesis plan another aggressive campaign in Japan, which, curiously, is second in world pasta consumption, and in Australia and South America, which have sizable Italian-descent populations. Aiming also for the big U.S. market, Agnesi hopes to overcome the American complex about weight by stressing that hard-wheat spaghetti contains only 300 calories a serving and is rich in B and E vitamins. Agnesi hopes to prove that it is also so filling that Americans, who can be distinguished at the table by their knife, fork, spoon, twirl, twist, scoop, slurp, and even chop, techniques, will not reach for richer foods at all.