The World's Favorite Food

About author / Amy Powell

World traveler; gourmet 30 minute meals; lover of exotic ingredients; winner on FoodTV's Chefs vs City; graduate French Culinary Institute. Her recipes will tantalize your taste buds.

It was really not surprising to me when I read this week that pasta has won the popularity contest for world’s favorite food. This result could raise a few eyebrows considering this was a global poll conducted by Oxfam and surveyed 16,000 people in 17 countries around the world as far reaching as Australia, Ghana, and the Philippines, not places one normally thinks about tucking into a plate of spaghetti. Most interesting perhaps is that the survey, done as part of research into the effects of rising food prices, brought to light the degree to which Western food tastes now influence world eating habits.

I am a perfect example. I have never been to Italy yet many of my favorites restaurants from San Francisco to New York to London are Italian. I have had pasta in penne in Laos, linguine in Hong Kong, and maccheroni in Mexico. And it has all been good.

In fact, the same day I was reading the results of the Oxfam report I had been thinking about spaghetti all morning long. It turns out that like many Australians, South Africans, and Brazilians, I don’t have to have been to the birth country of pasta to know it is one of my favorite things to eat.

Spaghetti, which accounts for 2/3 of global pasta consumption, is perhaps the perfect place to start trying to understand this worldwide love affair with a one particular food.

Like many people I grew up with a pantry stocked with boxes of the long, cylindrical dried sticks made of flour and water. Spaghetti with red sauce, the emblem of Italian American cooking, was one of those inexpensive, foolproof dishes my mom could trust the kids to pull off on nights she wasn’t home to cook: boil one box of noodles according to package direction, heat one jar of Newman’s Own tomato sauce until warm, spoon sauce over drained pasta and top with lots of grated Parmesan cheese. Kid friendly, mother approved, idiot proof.

Spaghetti with red sauce is so ingrained in the American psyche it is likely many Americans (or British or Brazilians) know that spaghetti can have a life free of the shackles of red sauce. In fact, when my own international love affair with pasta exploded it was largely due to my exploration of pasta beyond the tomato.

So it was the morning of my spaghetti fantasy. The pasta of which I was dreaming did not have so much as a tomato waived in the air above the pan. I was salivating over something much different and just as simple: spaghetti with olive oil, bottarga, and breadcrumbs, a Sardinian specialty.

One of the great developments of the world love affair with Italian food is that one no longer has to go to Italy to experience the many pleasures of more specific regional Italian cuisine. In New York I frequent Bianca, a restaurant in the Emilia Romagna style where tomatoes are infrequent but cream, Parmigiano Reggiano, eggs, and the region’s famous salumi are used liberally. In San Francisco, a little mom and pop restaurant on the edge of town called La Ciccia celebrates the food of the couple’s native Sardinia: spaghetti with bottarga and special pastas native to the island like the ridged dumpling malloreddus and the Israeli couscous sized fregola seasoned with saffron and local Pecorino.

There is something comforting to know that as diverse as the world is, something as simple as flour and water mixed together formed into shapes we call pasta can at least unite taste buds together. And as we move on beyond canned red sauce, even those of us who have yet to try pasta in its native land can take a virtual tour of Italy through pasta, the food that unites a sometimes fractured country and often distant world.

Serves/Makes: 8

• 1 pound dried spaghetti pasta
• salt
• 5 tablespoons olive oil, divided
• 4 spicy Italian sausage links
• 1/2 cup fresh breadcrumbs
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 handful fresh basil
• black pepper
• grated Pecorino or Parmesan cheese for garnish