So let me just share a text exchange between myself and Peter Hughes the bassist for the Mountain

Goats, a band you might know if you listen to this podcast.

Text from Peter, hey, do you remember the line from a Spigler Furniture Hershey song that something

about the Chinese inventing spaghetti.

They did, you know?

And I said, ha, that song was written by Joel

in Allison Hughes's living room.

I think I was vamping on a two-cord thing

and he wanted to sing something so he sang spaghetti

invented in China but then moved to Italy when it's soft yet firm it's called

al dente and that's a French word for spaghetti.

Pasta came from China and tomatoes came from the new world.

So everything that Italy, like the basis, the heart of Italian food, came to Italy relatively

late in Italian history from very different places.

Yeah, well I mean actually that's still true of Italy, like a lot of things you think of like, you know, like

gelato, right? So you think you're saying, oh this is the Italian thing. When did it happen? Well, they got exposed to some new

tech and they went, you know what we could do with that yeah I mean

espresso all this stuff I mean I think there's so many things that really good

things around the world that you would think they must have been there forever

because they're so good at it you you know, in whatever the thing.

Oh no, actually, we just, you know, we saw this machine and we said, oh, I could use that.

You know, it's like, but I think, but yeah, Italy is unique in that way. I think stuff that feels absolutely endemically Italian is actually the result of them coming into contact with some of their culture and then doing their thing.

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