National Spaghetti Day is a fun holiday you can celebrate with your family. It's likely already one of your kids favorites and it's our second favorite pasta and we love it! What's our first? Macaroni of course, lol. What's better than a big warm bowl of spaghetti and delicious sauce on a cool winter night? Enjoy a satisfying pasta dinner with your family and share with them a few, fun spaghetti facts!
Long before there was a "National" Spaghetti Day there were "other" spaghetti days. How did they start? I was wondering too, this is what I found after a lot of searching: The Start of Spaghetti Days. Tuesday is for Tacos and Wednesday can be for spaghetti! That works for me because we love spaghetti!
Do your kids know the spaghetti song? I'm talking about "On top of Spaghetti," it's one of my favorites.
More Fun spaghetti facts:
- President Thomas Jefferson was the first person to bring spaghetti to the United States.
- Spaghetti is the plural form of the Italian word spaghetto, which is a diminutive of spago, meaning “thin string” or “twine.”
- The first American pasta factory was opened in Brooklyn, New York, in 1848, by a Frenchman named Antoine Zerega. Mr. Zerega managed the entire operation with just one horse in his basement to power the machinery. To dry his spaghetti, he placed strands of the pasta on the roof to dry in the sunshine.
- Hector Boiardi, later know as Chef Boyardee just might be the reason spaghetti is such a popular dish in America
- One cup of cooked spaghetti provides about 200 calories, 40 grams of carbohydrates, less than one gram of total fat, no cholesterol and only one gram of sodium when cooked without salt.
- To cook one billion pounds of pasta, you would need 2,021,452,000 gallons of water - enough to fill nearly 75,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.
- One billion pounds of pasta is about 212,595 miles of 16-ounce packages of spaghetti stacked end-to-end - enough to circle the earth's equator nearly nine times.
- Speaking of spaghetti and meatballs, they're less Italian and more American. Years ago meat was very expensive in Italy, so it was only eaten on limited occasions and in much smaller portions. After Italians immigrated to America they found meat was more plentiful and more affordable. They began incorporating meat into their cooking more often. American meatballs are much different than those made in Italy, first the were typically served solo or in soup and second they were as much breadcrumbs as meat.
- The average person in Italy eats more than 51 pounds of pasta every year. The average person in North America eats about 15 1/2 pounds of pasta per year.
- There 600+ pasta shapes produced worldwide. I think you know which one is our favorite!
Did you know you can do more with spaghetti than just eat it? You can use it for educational building STEAM projects. You can keep it simple and use sticks of spaghetti with something soft like marshmallows or gummy candy, or you can get really creative and put on your engineering cap and learn about building bridges.
An interesting history of spaghetti in America:
While this may not be appropriate for kids (language) parents might enjoy watching:
This previously shared article has been updated and edited by Brenna Gutell, Publisher for Macaroni KID Conejo Valley - Malibu - Calabasas on December 28, 2022
