Recently I was invited to a primary school to talk to the whole assembly about food, cooking, nutrition and diet. More than 300 little faces were looking and, hopefully, listening to me talking about the five different food groups we should eat on a daily basis to be healthy and wise. When I got to the carbohydrates, I had to ask the inevitable question: 'How many of you like or even love pasta?'
Nearly 300 little hands shot up. But it was no surprise that the vast majority of the children liked pasta of some kind.
The word 'pasta' in Italian means paste. It is not clear how pasta originated. Some claim that it was brought to Italy from China in the 13th century, but there also seems to be evidence that certain types of pasta existed in the Mediterranean area over 3,000 years ago, when ancient people started to mix powdered grain with water. The great advantage of the dried pasta was and is that you can store it much longer than the grain itself.
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