I actually think most of the governmental functions in this article worked quite well. Told another way, a firm in the marketplace for pasta found that a competitor was out of regulation with their product, and they found a person in congress who could press a slow-moving and ineffective agency to do better at doing their job: enforcing said regulations.

That's exactly what you want your elected representatives to do: listen to their constituents and act accordingly to ensure a fair outcome according to the law. Note that no laws were changed in this to favor one company over another, if anything the previous state was one in which the company in question was profiting from shipping out-of-regulation product, perhaps at decreased cost compared to in-compliance firms.

The rule itself can be debated, but in general I find that a law specifying in exact numbers what a product should contain in order to qualify for a label to be a very good law. It's exact, it's measurable, and it's achievable by all. Fair and equal enforcement should make it a good regulation.

If you say "well you don't need this law, it's over-regulation", that's a good argument -- I'm not sure I have an opinion on that. On one hand, I think Standard of Identification make a lot of sense, but I also know that drawing the lines can be a very delicate art form (what makes a pasta noodle vs. a ramen noodle? What makes champagne vs. sparkling wine? And so on)

Edit: Also, I think a lot of this could be dealt with better by an FDA that has a good communication arm. "We found this company to not be compliance with existing law and took it off the shelves" sounds a lot better than having the company get to print saying "Seems like a hold up by the FDA"

Not sure how much experience you have working with business or government but what you'll find is that large corporates will have 'access' to regulators and legislators who can legislate or enforce on their behalf. The senior people will know each other and get things moving.

Medium sized businesses (up to $100m revenues) will find it very difficult even getting a response. Even getting their attention is a competitive advantage for large corporates.

So when you read a story and think things 'worked quite well'. It's just an example of selectively applying laws & regulations, which were only introduced to keep out competition and protect entrenched interests. That's why large corporates love regulations, it protects their entire business model and imposes significant costs on new entrants.

What do you think "access" looks like?

There is no "big pasta". There's like a handful of companies[1] that make it all. I'm sure the execs all own yachts but if you were to compare executive fleet displacement it's more of a Venezuelan navy than a French navy. They can't just call up their lobbyist who's already scheduled to golf with a congressman every other weekend and tell them to bring it up on their next trip. Only the Googles and the Exxons of the world have that kind of access.

What really happens is the some company notices that "hey, those other people are doing X and they're not supposed to, I'm losing money because of it. Then they call up the congressman in their district and say "I employ people in your district and pay taxes and I am getting screwed because morons who you have oversight over are not doing their jobs, make them do their goddamn jobs" but in nicer words and with situation specific details. And then the congressman's aid writes an email to someone that explains the situation and asks the relevant people to please take a look at it again.

The law might be stupid and the complaint might be petty but it's better than living in a world where state and federal legislators don't try and solve their constituents problems with government. For every stupid pasta beef there's a dozen more legitimate complaints that cross the desk of whichever staffer is doing constituent relations. My point is that the process of getting "access" to one's congressman is not really as nefarious as people make it out to be.

>Medium sized businesses (up to $100m revenues) will find it very difficult even getting a response. Even getting their attention is a competitive advantage for large corporate.

This hasn't been my experience but I suspect that it's going to depend a lot on the political optics of the specific industry relative to the representative.

[1] Check out this handy list and research the companies if you don't believe me. https://ilovepasta.org/membership/membership-directory/ Many are owned by larger brands but they are not particularly big businesses themselves. These are on the order of The Office sized companies.

> They can't just call up their lobbyist who's already scheduled to golf with a congressman every other weekend and tell them to bring it up on their next trip.

I think you're vastly underestimating the impact of lobbying and overestimating the cost

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/708195702

Tax Professor wants to try to get a policy (automatically filled out tax returns for CA state taxes)he thinks will be good for the public passed.

He gets nowhere.

Hires a lobbyist at a discount

> BANKMAN: They gave me a deal because they thought it would be kind of fun to work for this crazed professor.

> VANEK SMITH: They were working for you, just you?

> BANKMAN: Yeah. They were working for me. And so the normal price, I think, would have been $140,000 to get Mike's services. But he gave it to me for only 35. So I paid 35,000, I believe.

Got a lot closer (opt in automatic filling) despite massive opposition from anti tax groups and tax prep software lobbyists

Reading that transcript actually left me thinking the system worked okay in this particular case, even though it led to a bad (in my opinion) policy outcome. The money bought access, not results: in the end, the legislators who voted against largely it did so because of personal belief the policy was bad or because of political pressure from an important campaign group (+), not because of money from Intuit (and it didn't take too much in absolute terms---$140K at full price---to equalize the lobbying power of a single-person pet project with that of a multibillion-dollar company with a strong vested interest in seeing the legislation defeated).

(+): I'm not personally a Grover Norquist fan, but he's influential because a lot of Americans really don't like taxes, and the argument that people will be more opposed to taxes if they're more burdensome does seem internally consistent.

Nobody likes taxes, and Norquist just makes it more painful. Ideologues are jerks.

>Nobody likes taxes, and Norquist just makes it more painful. Ideologues are jerks.

Not nobody. I'm one of the ones who agrees with (purportedly) Oliver Wendell Holmes[0].

[0] "I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization." Source: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/13/taxes-civilize/

I'm ok with paying taxes (for the reason cited) but I don't like paying them. And part of that is the inconvenience that Norquist has worked to ensure.

It's small relative to other industries but its still a multi-billion dollar industry. Each of the largest companies will have PR agencies, personal contacts within the FDA, revolving door of staff between the FDA and the corporates, positions on standards committees, board members who have spent a life time in food safety governance. I'm sure many of these manufacturers are the largest employers in some congressional districts so it wouldn't be a surprise if they managed to get a congressman to write the FDA to focus attention on this. The same complaint from a small company will never get the same attention.

My point is that their scale and resources gives them access. A competitor breached a pointless regulation [1] from the last century which has prevented their product from being sold for a year. If one of the large corporates breached that regulation, they would have been able to quickly agree corrective action with minimal supply chain disruption.

[1] Many of these food regs are designed to enrich staple foods that were the main source of nutrients for low income families. That's just not an issue anymore and just prevents (high quality) imports.

This food regulation is not really based on health or nutrients or anything like that, nor is it pointless. It stems from an effort to define what can be marketed as a pasta noodle vs. other similar yet different products, like ramen noodles.

There are similar regulations that define, for example, what is a whiskey and what isn't.

Sure X amount of Y substance vs. X-epsilon amount will always look ridiculous on the face of it, but ultimately there needs to exist some line and some definition.

I don't find this argument particularly convincing.

Am I drinking "sparkling wine" or "champagne"? Honestly, why should I care, I just care about how much I like the product and how much it costs.

I'm for regulation around areas about product safety, but this seems to not be what's going on here.

    Am I drinking "sparkling wine" or "champagne"? 
    Honestly, why should I care, I just care about 
    how much I like the product and how much it costs.

I think you are seriously underestimating the utility of walking into a store, seeing a product labeled as XYZ, and being assured that it meets some reasonable definition of XYZ without having to do a bunch of research and/or testing on your own.

Packaged food is an extremely cost-sensitive product category to put it mildly. There is tremendous pressure on these companies to shave off every penny they can when it comes to production costs.

I strongly suggest that we do not want to see what might happen if the FDA didn't enforce some kind of minimum definitions for various categories.

For a sneak peek of the probable outcome, you can learn about the history of adulterated food products: https://www.google.com/search?q=history+of+adulterated+food

I tend to agree with you but you might find this more common than you realize. I’ve noticed in my lifetime products I like change their recipes. I’ve also seen products once labeled as ice cream now labeled as frozen dairy dessert. I’ve seen this type of thing in lots of different products. Not just ice cream. And I’m not convinced anything changed legally in many cases. Usually I suspect it was to reduce costs.

It’s now something I actively look for on packaging when a product gets a new look.

> but its still a multi-billion dollar industry

There's 330 million people in the US. Everything the average person spends six dollars a year on is a multi- billion dollar industry.

>Each of the largest companies will have PR agencies, personal contacts within the FDA, revolving door of staff between the FDA and the corporate, positions on standards committees, board members who have spent a life time in food safety governance

Think about how many people someone will work with and befriend over a lifetime. You're pretending that's a high bar when it's a low bar.

>The same complaint from a small company will never get the same attention.

You should go to the NPA's website (linked in TFA, you have exolymph's comment to thank for prompting me to look it up), go to the membership directory and start looking up these pasta companies before you run your mouth. While many of the companies are wholly owned subsidiaries or larger more mainstream food brands but none of them seem to exceed the BLS definition of medium sized. If the FDA enforcement action unfolded the way we are all assuming it is then that would seem to indicate medium-smallish companies do have their legislator's ear (or they just tipped off the FDA directly and then just kept following up until the FDA was annoyed enough to do something).

Edit:

Here's Medallion Foods, Virginia Park foods which seem to be among the biggest (ballpark estimate based on facility sized and value of what's in the parking lot) and one in Montana that I thought was cool because they had the street named after them. All these companies seem to have their office location the same as their manufacturing location so it's kind of hard to get a sense of scale.

https://www.google.com/maps/@47.0889449,-122.3631175,3a,75y,...

https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0173065,-117.3829804,3a,75y,...

https://www.google.com/maps/@47.5168777,-111.2619547,3a,75y,...

> A competitor breached a pointless regulation[1] from the last century which has prevented their product from being sold for a year.

>[1] Many of these food regs are designed to enrich staple foods that were the main source of nutrients for low income families. That's just not an issue anymore and just prevents (high quality) imports.

The last century was 20yr ago. HN would be out for blood if someone was caught importing completely functional catalytic converters or bicycle helmets that didn't meet some irrelevant to performance nuance of the law. HN is sympathetic in this case because the product in question is an upscale-ish pasta. If regulations on some ingredient were being manipulated in a way that was only affecting production of cheap lite beer we'd be reading through several hundred snarky comments about how this is a good thing.

Chastising someone here for ‘running their mouth’ when they are commenting in good faith is not welcome.

No one was ‘out for blood,’ the poster simply made the claim that the inability to lobby effectively is a challenge to smaller companies. That’s exactly why the consortium you listed exists, and is based in DC.

I would guess that, usually, interests align and it most often helps a small manufacturer that ADM (16 bil revenue a year) is in the pasta business. However, if ADM wants to get a good deal on the majority stake of a gluten-free pasta up-and-comer, they likely have a few levers they can pull to create pressure.

> There is no "big pasta". There's like a handful of companies that make it all.

Uh...

I think it's obviously true that monied interests will have greater access to regulators and corporations than smaller operations do. We should seek to limit that advantage when possible, but it's doubtful that we can ever truly eliminate it.

Speaking specifically about this case though, it doesn't seem like a big business tossing its weight around, but some large multinational businesses working within existing regulatory and bureaucratic systems to ensure their competitors are not unfairly gaining by flouting the law.

It is akin to an auto company finding another company has saved money by not complying with emissions standards.

> I find that a law specifying in exact numbers what a product should contain in order to qualify for a label to be a very good law.

Good in theory. But it's also likely to slow down innovation or even kill it in its tracks. Maybe a producer wants to mix up the ingredients because they're making a substandard product. But maybe they discovered a way to deliver higher quality or lower price with an iteration on the original. In the long run, consumers will mostly discover the shitty products and stop buying them anyway.

For example if such a law was in place for desktop computers, it almost assuredly would have required x86-compatible CPUs. It's highly unlikely that Apple would made the investment to produce the incredible gains in the M1, if it was forced to market the MacBook Air as "not legally a laptop"

It’s a notebook computer, duh

I've never heard a normal person ever use the phrase "notebook computer".

I am generally a pro regulation type of person, but the article suggests the regulation was meant to block Asian noodles and favor European ones. So whether or not De Cecco bucatini needs the extra few milligrams of iron, while still satisfying EU health requirements, is a relevant question.

> I actually think most of the governmental functions in this article worked quite well.

Having clear [communication of] regulations that food importers could understand, and expect to be enforced in a consistent way that didn't require a lobbying arm, would work a lot better.

> I actually think most of the governmental functions in this article worked quite well.

Permit me indulge in a minor rant. Not against you, just generally.

A specialty pasta manufacturer in Italy (home of pasta, but what do they know?) can no longer export a specialty pasta (which they sell legally in Italy), because it's marginally under-enriched by US government standards for pasta, and so the consumers in the US, who specifically seek out their favorite food, must go without, and this is ... the system working as intended, indeed, working quite well!

> If you say "well you don't need this law, it's over-regulation", that's a good argument

Ah. The thing is it's not a specific piece of legislation, it's one of those regulations the FDA itself came up with to begin with (Code of Federal Regulations, Title 21 Chapter 1 Subchapter B Section 139.115, if I'm reading it right).

So then, aside from the fact that it's bullshit to begin with, and no one is changing the bullshit, and that everyone is expected to accept the other 114-plus sections times the 138-or-more parts of Subchapter B times all the twenty-plus other titles, and whatever minutiae they may demand... and that broadly we are all expected take this class of thing as simply as The Way Things Are, a perfectly natural consequence of doing business in our world that we dare not question, well, then -- yes, aside from all that, you're quite right, everything is working quite well!

And yet somehow I feel things are broken, and moreover, that if you say something about it, you'll find a dozen people to complain that you're nothing but an eeeevil capitalist who would poison our oceans and black out our skies just to make an extra $3.50 in pocket change, if not simply out of spite generally.

>you'll find a dozen people to complain that you're nothing but an eeeevil capitalist who would poison our oceans and black out our skies just to make an extra $3.50 in pocket change, if not simply out of spite generally.

I wouldn't be one of those people, trust me. I won't go into what my line of work is, but suffice to say I may actually be one of those evil capitalists.

I DO think this is one of those cost-of-doing-business type of things when it comes to international trade. I think most consumers appreciate that when they go and buy something that labels itself "pasta", it conforms to some standard that we can agree is reasonable. Otherwise, you'll likely have someone who stuffs ramen noodles into a pasta package and sells it to some suckers. And now we all have to always know which are the "real" pasta brands and which are the fakes(yes, that might be easy enough to do, but it's the overall cognitive load of having to do that with every product that should concern us). That's just an example, but that's why the regulations exist.

And you can't just say "well they sell this in Italy, and that's the home of pasta, so c'mon man this can't be right", because Italy I'm sure has like 3x more regulations around pasta selling (a cursory google search shows this is likely true), and any change they make to their regulation will keep in mind the interests of their consumers and their producers. They will not be thinking of American interests when making those regulations.

Finally, it's worth keeping in mind that this one company that was recently restricted for not being in compliance is NOT the only manufacturer of Bucatini, and in fact may not be the largest or best manufacturer either. It's just one company that returned the reporter's calls and had an answer for them.

One aspect of the article's chatty style that I liked was that it gave a glimpse into how "reporting" sausage gets made: calling experts up on the phone to try to get them to tell you a story, filing information requests, looking up publicly available (but obscure) information. Even though the author is self-deprecating, by the end I was impressed by her persistence and ability to dig up real new information. I sometimes wish more straight-laced reporting would be more forthcoming with these kinds of details.

I had the very opposite reaction. The snobbery of “the only pasta worth eating”, which is an insult to the diversity of Italian cuisine, deflated me right at the start. I know it’s supposed to be funny, but also that there is a hint of self-deprecating truth to it... think I’m getting old.

I don’t find it snobbish at all. The author is making high stakes out of an obviously low stakes situation. It’s absurdist. I don’t find it particularly funny, but it is a comedy piece through and through.

This is not a person who is taking themselves seriously:

> I felt more determined than ever to solve this mystery, not just for myself but for the cast of Saturday Night Live and also the rest of the people of the United States of America, who had been through too much for too long to then have insult added to injury via the spontaneous and inexplicable disappearance of the best noodle.

I agree that the writing is well done, though the story didn’t hold my attention. I bailed at about the halfway point.

That becomes clear as the article progresses, but you need to get through the first few paragraphs.

I think it's deliberately hyperbolic; I don't see any reason to read it as the author literally believing that.

>Italian cuisine

Wow, I hope you reserved some of your outrage for pasta from other cuisines. Or do they not count lol

It’s like they’re trying to sound so refined and particular that only one kind of pasta is worth eating, but it makes you think they know nothing about pasta, or cooking it.

Funny, I read it as entirely the opposite, as very tongue-in-cheek and self-deprecating, where the author just exaggerates these things but anyone would know he doesn't mean them seriously. Interesting that we seem to have such different reactions to this writing. :-)

There's this strange cultural divide in the US, and it's not a republican-Democrat thing or a gender thing or a race thing. People from certain cliques are more comfortable with snark, self deprecation, and the sort of hyperbolic lampooning that this article engaged in (I'm in this camp), whereas others read snobbery and cruelty and such from identical sources (and I'm fairly certain the author isnot implying they are better than anyone because of their love for 'the best pasta').

It might be a coastal thing. My Brooklyn friends are usually camp A, my California people skew more camp B, but that's not a hard rule and super subject to sample bias.

I guess Jeremy Howard ran into camp B with his notebook talk, hard

> I'm fairly certain the author is not implying they are better than anyone because of their love for 'the best pasta'

That’s the thing - I am sure they (and the readers) do feel superior for their choice of pasta - or something equally pedestrian, it is what makes the whole “hyperbolic lampooning” work - it wouldn’t be funny if didn’t have a vein of truth.

That’s off-putting, maybe because we cant identify with that attitude anymore. Different life stages (I’d be surprised if the author is over 26).

> That’s off-putting, maybe because we cant identify with that attitude anymore. Different life stages (I’d be surprised if the author is over 26).

Maybe that style of dry humor is off-putting and associated with a specific age to you, but I find it to be timeless.

The author's in her mid 30s, and there are numerous other older people who use a similar sardonic wry sense of humor well, from David Sedaris to the kindhearted kvetching of old jewish grandmothers.

What you're doing with this comment is both similar and different. You're effectively saying "Well, I don't like it because I'm more mature; I can recognize that there's a grain of truth in her self-depreciation, and by recognizing that, I'm better than her". Effectively, you're aggrandizing yourself in the same way you accuse her of doing so, but without any of the humor.

> I am sure they (and the readers) do feel superior for their choice of pasta

I find that likely as well - that the author really feels some superiority over the pedestrian spagetti - but then they started shaming orecchiette and satire becomes the most likely explanation.

I also hugely disliked the style and tone of the article. I finished it thinking "well, I guess anyone can call themselves a journalist nowadays". The humor was out of place too, just coming across as snobbish most of the time, even though I can tell what the author is doing. It's just....too much.

But hey, other people like it so who am I too judge ;-)

For me this had a David Sedaris, obsessive-compulsive writing style that I ended up hugely enjoying, though I admit I didn't get it at first and almost gave up reading. The fact that she opened a Freedom of Information request with the FDA about noodles while acknowledging that the agency was most likely preoccupied with the pandemic made me laugh out loud.

If this were just a matter-of-fact reportage on a particular type of pasta shortage I doubt it'd hold much interest for anyone. The whole enjoyment for me was the gonzo reporting style of someone going off the rails about the shortage of a particular type of noodle.

I don't normally comment on points count, but I've never had a comment go from +12 to 0 before, what a polarising opinion ;-)

Don't worry, you're not alone in thinking this article was trash, I stopped reading after the first paragraph

I can't help but think of Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack. During a golf tournament, he gives the officials some money saying "keep it fair, keep it fair!"

The writing was brilliant. Reading it was like quenching a long thirst. It reminds of me reading the New York Times or Financial Times 10 or more years ago.

If you like this writing style, food critic Jay Rayner writes in a way I find pretty similar: https://www.theguardian.com/food/series/jay-rayner-on-restau...

That's really funny to me. I saw this article yesterday being raved about on foodie Twitter, but didn't try submitting to HN because I figured many users might be a little annoyed by not only a food story, but one that takes 1,200 words (i.e. the length of "Part 1: The Mystery") before getting to the chase. A 1,200 word scene-setting intro is a lot for any kind of reader so it's a testament to the author's skill that it's entertaining enough to keep readers' attention.

I appreciate these sorts of long-form pieces, personally. I have always been a voracious reader though.

The taxes on sugar were to prop up the (heavily subsidized) US corn industry. Why do you think they even water down the gasoline with it? There's so much of it, and it's so artificially cheap, and they want to keep demand high to keep the farmers happy.

The taxes on sugar have nothing to do with corn. Corn producers do not need HFCS to stay in business, they have ethanol when they need a subsidy; less than 5% of US production goes to HFCS, but the rest is basically split 50/50 between animal feed and ethanol.

Sugar imports are taxed so that US producers (cane in FL & LA, sugar beets in the upper midwest and upper great plains states) do not have to compete with cane sugar from Brazil and Mexico. It is as simple as that.

Your sugar example is not a good example because the US setup a mandate to be totally food supply independent after the Dust Bowl/famine in the early part of the last century.

So foreign sugar sources, like any major staple, are heavily tariffed.

That’s not the history I’m familiar with regarding sugar tariffs.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-12-18/u-s-su...

It’s very amusing to me that the US subsidized domestic sugar production, and then also pays for diabetes and it’s related healthcare costs.

I’m confident that the future will look back and determine sugar to be one of the most costly habits of people.

You linked to an opinion piece that doesn't cite anything.

It criticizes that there are broad staple food import tariffs, but does not discuss the purpose of these policies, which is national food security.

The US has not experienced a food shortage, despite the normal incidence of crop failures in over a hundred years.

The fact that Americans suffer from food oversupply is absolutely a first world problem.

Sorry, I didn’t realize it was an opinion piece. I had just remembered reading multiple times that sugar tariffs were implemented to enrich domestic sugar producers. This seems like a better analysis:

https://ksr.hkspublications.org/2016/03/18/sweet-nothings-th...

Sugar, like all crop staples are supported by the government to ensure that crops are overproduced to protect against crop failure and famine.

Any article, like the one you just linked, that omits this fact is a horrible source of information.

I'm sure you HAVE INDEED read the misinformation about farm subsidies before - it is a popular lie.

This article talks a little bit more about current high food prices globally, and how it impacts US food security stockpiles....

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=4770135&page=1

Sounds like you didn’t read your own source then...

> It’s very amusing to me that the US subsidized domestic sugar production, and then also pays for diabetes and it’s related healthcare costs.

Subsidizing domestic sugar production by spiking the price of sugar... means less sugar consumption. What's the joke?

Gonzo food writing w a sprinkling of twitterhumor

The sugar tax is pretty simple. Corn grows in north america and sugar cane doesn't.

It'd be more accurate to say that corn grows in many more places in North America than sugar cane. I was surprised to learn that vastly more pounds of sugar from cane is produced in the US (~32 million pounds a year) than corn syrup (~8 million pounds a year).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_industry_of_the_United_S...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup#Unite...

The values listed there are the sugar cane harvest, not the sugar produced from it.

Per https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/outlooks/100085/sss-m-388.p... the recovery rate varies from 9 to 14 percent.

Cane sugar production runs about 4 million short tons, which is about 8 billion pounds. Beets add a similar, somewhat larger amount.

HFCS production is also on a similar scale, billions of pounds a year. But then 80% of corn goes to animal feed and ethanol production, so HFCS isn't the major end use.

> Corn grows in north america and sugar cane doesn't.

Sugarcane most definitely grows in North America. Florida alone produces hundreds of thousands of tons of raw sugar annually.

I dare OP to drive around outside of Lafayette, LA and roll his window down and tell me sugarcane doesn't grow in America