Wednesday, February 11, 2004

Pasta promoters are ready to fight back

By FRANK BRUNI, THE NEW YORK TIMES

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ROME -- There comes a time when a besmirched, besieged food must step up to the plate and defend its honor, or at least its carbohydrate count.

Here in the land that has loved and cooked it best, pasta is about to make its stand.

For three days next week, physicians, chefs, pasta manufacturers and other pasta partisans will gather in Italy's capital for a full-boiled response to the advances of the low-carbohydrate Atkins diet, which threatens to put rigatoni on the run.

"We're not dancing anymore," said K. Dun Gifford, the president of Oldways Preservation and Exchange Trust, the Boston nutrition research and advocacy group that is organizing the conference. "This is 'Pasta Fights Back.' It needs to."

Gifford was using the nickname that he and other participants have given the event. Officially titled "Healthy Pasta Meals," it is more than a summit of experts and entrepreneurs who are invested, gastronomically or financially, in the fate of fusilli. It is a telltale moment in the carbohydrate wars, a clear sign of how tough it is these days to be a starch.

What with the Atkins and South Beach diets, Sugar Busters and Protein Power, the carbohydrate is viewed by many Americans as a positively menacing macronutrient, the evil root of all love handles.

"It's a frenzy," said Susan Toussaint, director of marketing for the American Italian Pasta Co. of Kansas City, Mo., referring to the widespread shunning of carbohydrates in the United States. Toussaint said that over the last 12 months, her company, a conference sponsor, had a roughly 5 percent drop in American grocery-store sales of its pasta.

She said that decline was typical of the pasta industry and that one reason was the indiscriminate vilification of all carbohydrates. "Pasta's getting lumped in the same category as Krispy Kreme," she said. "It's not fair. All carbohydrates are not created equal."

That is the overarching message of the conference. Its many sponsors and patrons also include Barilla, a leading Italian pasta manufacturer. Although few Italians have begun kneeling to the low-carbohydrate gods, trends do tend to travel across the Atlantic.

"If people stop eating pasta, it's bad for us," said Renzo Rizzo, a senior executive at Barilla.

Rome was chosen as the conference site for the semiotic and theatrical garnishes it provides. What better setting in which to praise pasta -- and to point out that Italians, who eat it regularly, are generally slimmer, and live longer, than Americans?

Gifford has drafted scientists from around the world to make pasta's case.

"We're doing damage control for pasta, if you like," said Dr. David J.A. Jenkins, who teaches metabolism and nutrition at the University of Toronto's medical school.

Jenkins is an authority on the glycemic index, a measure of how quickly food is metabolized and how suddenly it raises blood sugar. Steep jolts are widely considered bad for health and weight. He said pasta's dense, compact nature means it is digested more slowly than other starches.

Jenkins plans to explain all of this at the conference, which begins on Monday at the Cavalieri Hilton outside Rome's historic center. Also on the agenda are discussions of everything from cooking to cardiovascular disease, from the properties of wheat to fad diets through the ages.

"There was a graham-cracker diet at the beginning of the 1900s," said Gifford, whose group promotes a style of eating known as the Mediterranean diet.

The Mediterranean diet exalts olive oil, recommends restraint around red meat and makes ample allowance for pasta, which Michael Romano, the executive chef at the Union Square Cafe in Manhattan, described as a safe harbor in a confused culinary universe with "layers of mad cow disease and crazy chicken disease."

"It's good to try to find some sanity in all of this," said Romano, who will lend his talents to a big pasta dinner at the conference. "It's my comfort food. It's my soul food."