You already know that Italians love pasta. And maybe you do too...but trust me: an Italian will be able to eat you under the table when it comes to the amount of pasta they can consume.
Francesco eats pasta every day. He calls himself a pastone, which is a joke that just means someone who eats a lot of pasta.
I like pasta, but damn. I can't do it every day. Coming from a place where I could easily access Thai, Japanese, Mexican, Ethiopian, Indian, and just about any other type of cuisine, it's been hard for me to (literally) stomach eating so much pasta and nothing else (though there is pizza...).
So...How Much IS a Lot of Pasta?
Rumor has it that Italians eat an average of 60 pounds of pasta each year. That's a lot. And yes, they do eat other things. Pasta, as Francesco puts it, is the prince. It's what comes first in the meal. After that, you can have a secondo of meat or fish, and maybe a salad. But everything starts with that Prince Pasta!
If Francesco eats with me and I cook something other than pasta, he marvels that he could get through an entire day without his fix!
Why Don't Italians Weigh 300 Pounds?
Ah, the big question. After all, they eat pastries for breakfast and pasta sometimes twice a day. Why aren't Italians as big as houses?
Despite them eating so many carbs, they don't actually eat a mountain of it at each meal. They, unlike me, know they've got more courses coming in a meal, and so they eat a modest amount of pasta and save room for the rest, which is usually meat and veggies.
And of course, when you're walking everywhere, that helps digest all those carbs.
I'm still trying to master the art of not eating everything (they're so insistent that I do and I don't like to hurt people's feelings! Plus it's so good) so I can make room for the rest, but I'm failing pretty miserably.