Pastasciutta

 ~ All the defenders of pasta and implacable enemies of Futurist cooking are melancholy types, content with their melancholy and propagandists of melancholy.

 ~ Pasta - the gloomy satisfaction of stopping up a black hole. This voracious hole is an incurable sadness.[...] nothing can fill it. Only a futurist meal can lift their spirits.

~ Pasta is anti-virile because a heavy bloated stomach does not encourage physical enthusiasm for a woman, nor favour the possibility of possessing her at any time.

~ The habitual and exaggerated use of pasta certainly causes obesity and exaggerated abdominal volume. The great consumers of pasta have slow and Pacific characters, while meat eaters are quick and aggressive (Prof. Nicola Pender - Clinician).

~ To vary our foods is a biological law; experience shows the constant repetition of the same food is a cause of damage (Prof. Senator U. Gabbi - Clinician).

~ I believe that the use of pasta may be harmful to intellectual workers, to people who lead a sedentary life and, above all, to people who low themselves meat and other dishes as well (Prof. Senator Albertoni).

~ It's a matter of taste and of the price in the market. In any case the best thing is a mixed diet and never one based on a single food (Prof. A. Herlitzka -Physiologist).

~ The nutritive value of pastasciutta does not offer any special characteristics that might make it preferable to those of other types of farinaceous foods (Prof. Antonio Riva - Clinician).

~ Pasta cannot be considered a food which is easily digested because it dilates the stomach and unlike bread does not undergo a sufficient preparation through mastication (Prof  Dr C. Tarchetti).

~ The Duke of Bovino, Mayor of Naples, declared that the Angels in Paradise eat nothing but vermicelli with tomato sauce.

~ Cavaliere Pettini, head chef to the King of Italy, says: It is beyond doubt that all farinaceous foods weigh the body down and in consequence are a threat to the intelligence. He also says: The necessity of innovations, of modernism in cooking too, a business which must also respond to the times and even lead them.

~ Schopenhauer styled [pasta] the food of the resigned. Alas, even our upper classes, the intellectuals, even the so-called leaders don't know how to feed themselves properly.

~ Surgeon, Giovanni da Vigo, gave an explicit formal warning against the abuse of pasta, the prescription for a bloated sixteenth century: all the pasta dishes must be used very infrequently.

~ Libero Glaucoma Silvano wrote: wasn't it time to do something about that barbaric food [...] I'm speaking of macaroni in a sauce.

~ Dacovio Saraceni wrote: macaroni was born and raised among the Ostrogoth who often enjoyed comforting themselves with him.

~ Audisio wrote: yes, pasta really is a dictatorship of the stomach.

~ Marinetti wrote in his manifesto: no more spaghetti for the Italians.

~ It is not just a question of replacing pasta with rice, or of ordering one dish to another, but of inventing new foods.

* Information taken from 'The Futurist Cookbook' written by Filippo Tomaso Marinetti *