Source: Sara Boden, "A Mass-Produced Yet Authentic Food: A Transatlantic History of Pasta, Identity, and National Values in Italy and the US, 1890 to 1974" (Clemson University, 2019).
Pasta is so common in American grocery stores today that it is easy to forget it was once marketed mainly to Italian immigrant communities. Historian Sara Boden traces how public policy, industry, and advertising reshaped the food on both sides of the Atlantic.
Boden writes that the U.S. Department of Agriculture once treated wider pasta consumption as a way to support wheat farming on the Great Plains. Encouraging Americans to eat more macaroni and spaghetti, the argument went, could help make land west of the Missouri River more profitable for grain growers. For manufacturers, reaching native-born shoppers outside Italian neighborhoods opened a much larger market.
After World War II, American advertising firms linked pasta with travel and sensory experience. Boden cites campaigns for Buitoni Foods in which an Italian company background was used to signal authenticity to U.S. buyers. In Italy, tourism promoters and culinary groups responded by defining regional dishes and hosting food fairs to protect local identity from homogenized industrial production.
The result was not a single "American pasta," but a layered history: immigrant recipes, federal agricultural policy, factory scaling, and marketing all working at once. That history helps explain why a deli like Piemonte's can still sell house-made sauce and pasta trays while boxed pasta sits in every supermarket aisle.
Try our deli menu for pasta and sauce made in-house, or browse catering options for larger orders.
