Can Italians Keep Up Their Pasta Intake When Energy Costs Are Rocketing?

Sustainability Can Italians Keep Up Their Pasta Intake When Energy Costs Are Rocketing? Daniela De Lorenzo Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. I write about sustainable food & agriculture production systems. Following New! Follow this author to stay notified about their latest stories.

Got it! Sep 15, 2022, 11:18am EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin An employee makes fresh pasta inside a takeaway pasta restaurant in Bologna, Italy, on Tuesday, Nov. . .

. [+] 26, 2019. Bologna is the crown jewel of the Italian left—and if Matteo Salvini captures it, his climb to the top may be unstoppable.

Photographer: Alessia Pierdomenico/Bloomberg © 2019 Bloomberg Finance LP A Facebook post by Italian Physics Nobel Prize laureate Giorgio Parisi suggesting to cook pasta by turning off the stove to limit energy bills, sparked outrage among fellow countrymen. As the conflict between Russia and Ukraine continues and the European Union attempts to drift away from Russian gas, the energy prices in Europe are increasing significantly putting pressures on citizens’ ability to pay their bills. An Italian resident consumes on average 23.

5 kg of pasta yearly, whereas the high electricity demands for cooking it, is caused by the need of large amounts of water to reach high temperatures and for it to keep boiling. As suggested by the Nobel laureate, cooking pasta without the heat on, is quite straightforward as one just has to heat the water in a pot until it boils. At this point pasta is tossed in and a lid to keep the heat in is put in place.

The cooker is turned off and the pasta is then drained after the cooking time indicated on the packet is over. Despite many Italians refusing to follow this practice, and having turned to social media or online media to share their dissent , already in May, the association of pasta producers Unione Pastai suggested taking the now so called “Parisi method” up, so to limit electricity bill and emissions caused by cooking. In 2001 a study conducted by the Department of Industrial Ecology of the Swedish KTH Royal Institute of Technology, found that one portion of food commonly served as part of hot meals can be produced with life cycle energy inputs ranging from 0.

33 MJ to 6. 0 MJ per portion. MORE FOR YOU Is Carbon Capture Another Fossil Fuel Industry Con? Sustainable Fashion Wants Brands To Redefine Business Growth Trouble With Predicting Future Of Transportation Is That Today Gets In The Way The study was initiated so to track how Swedish food consumption patterns changed in time, finding that an increase of pasta in the diets of Swedes was increasing household energy usage in the Scandinavian country.

Italians however remain the highest consumers of this product in all its types and shapes. For Italians to taking up this new cooking practice could save each citizen 44. 6 kWh, roughly $ 6 in one year ( whereas a kWh is now costing $ 0,14).

This figure may seem futile, but in the macro perspective it would bring Italy to spare a total of 350 million kWh of energy, and around $ 47,6 million. Moreover, as it is the cooking phase that has the highest environmental footprint, totallying the 38%, cutting cooking time would avoid the emission of 13. 3 kg of CO2 and the usage of 69 litres of water per person, yearly.

It is not only the price of energy that is raising when it comes to make a pasta dish. The war is impacting the whole food supply chain leading pasta producers to consider closing part of their production lines, whereas canned goods producers see the increase of prices of glass (+ 30%), tetrapack (+15%), cardboard (+45%) tinplate cans (+60%) and plastic (+70%) to jar their sauces ingredients. The Italian Ministry of Ecological Transition published in early September a plan to limit gas consumption during the winter, following the European energy-saving plan developed to respond to the crisis the closing of the natural gas Nord Stream 1 pipeline will provoke in the continent.

Meanwhile, the President of the European Commission Ursula Von der Leyen shared in her third annual address on Wednesday 15 September, at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, a plan for energy firms to limit profits to raise $ 140 billion and help European citizens with rising bills. This news might have kept some hopes within Italian households and kitchen: as changing habit engrained into cultural practice might be a tough ones, Italians so far will only commit to lower their cooking time, just so to have their pasta ‘al dente’. Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn .

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