Austrian permit shows man wearing pasta strainer

13 July 2011 Last updated at 14:42 GMT Having received his driving licence, Niko Alm now wants to get pastafarianism officially recognised An Austrian atheist has won the right to be shown on his driving-licence photo wearing a pasta strainer as "religious headgear".

Niko Alm first applied for the licence three years ago after reading that headgear was allowed in official pictures only for confessional reasons.

Mr Alm said the sieve was a requirement of his religion, pastafarianism.

The Austrian authorities required him to obtain a doctor's certificate that he was "psychologically fit" to drive.

The idea came into Mr Alm's noodle three years ago as a way of making a serious, if ironic, point.

A self-confessed atheist, Mr Alm says he belongs to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a light-hearted faith whose members call themselves pastafarians.

A medical interview established the self-styled 'pastafarian' was mentally fit to drive

The group's website states that "the only dogma allowed in the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is the rejection of dogma".

In response to pressure for American schools to teach the Christian theory known as intelligent design, as an alternative to natural selection, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster wrote to the Kansas School Board asking for the pastafarian version of intelligent design to be taught to schoolchildren, as an alternative to the Christian theory.

Straining credulity

In the same spirit, Mr Alm's pastafarian-style application for a driving licence was a response to the Austrian recognition of confessional headgear in official photographs.

The licence took three years to come through and, according to Mr Alm, he was asked to submit to a medical interview to check on his mental fitness to drive but - straining credulity - his efforts have finally paid off.

It is the police who issue driving licences in Austria, and they have duly issued a laminated card showing Mr Alm in his unorthodox item of religious headgear.

The next step, Mr Alm told the Austrian news agency APA, is to apply to the Austrian authorities for pastafarianism to become an officially recognised faith.

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Pasta pro

22 June 2011 Last updated at 08:41 GMT The program video shows what the finished product should look like Italian scientists say they have invented a way to teach people highly dextrous tasks using computer software and a basic webcam. Dany Mitzman watched Italians use it to try to make the fiendishly difficult tortellini.

The scientists from the University of Bologna are so passionate about their hometown's world famous pasta, it has become the inspiration for their latest software.

Celebrated for its rich food, the north Italian city known as Bologna la grassa - Bologna the fat - can now boast a computer game based on one of its most traditional dishes, tortellini.

Tortellini are tiny meat-stuffed pasta shapes, said to have been inspired by the navel of the goddess Venus.

Rolling the dough paper-thin, then twisting it into perfect identical packages, is a tricky art which takes years of practice. Tortellino X-perience offers players a taste of what that entails.

Continue reading the main story

The software could easily be used in museums, schools or exhibitions, allowing people to play games”

End Quote Marco Roccetti Professor of computer science 'Kneading and twisting' "We chose tortellini for two reasons," explained professor of computer science, Marco Roccetti, who invented the software together with his undergraduate students.

"The first reason was that we wanted to find a new way of preserving the culinary, cultural heritage of our home town, and the second was that making tortellini is a hard task.

"So designing and architecting a game based on that was a hard task from a technical viewpoint too."

Tortellino X-perience is a multimedia teaching game combining a traditional video with a 3D representation of the player's hands.

Players watch a real pasta maker demonstrate each step of the complicated tortellini-making process in the video.

Then they have to simulate her actions; from making, kneading and rolling out the dough to cutting, stuffing, sealing and twisting it into tortellini.

Their movements are tracked by gesture recognition software using a webcam, so they can see them shown in real time on the screen through stop-motion video.

Each step has to be imitated correctly before players can move up a level.

"I was inspired by a training game I saw for monks on a research trip to the Sony lab in Japan," said Prof Roccetti.

Making tortellini well - like Luisa - takes years of practice

"There was a wall on which the correct actions, duration of movements and duration of silences was projected. Tracked by sensors, the monks had to copy every step perfectly to learn to perform their traditional tea ceremony."

Tortellino X-perience is not on sale. It is designed as a demo to showcase its most important innovation: that it is console-free.

Unlike Nintendo's Wii, you do not need a remote control to play it and, unlike Microsoft's Kinect, you do not need a sophisticated and expensive 3D camera.

'Other applications'

Putting the emphasis on software, the low-cost game uses no hardware other than an ordinary 10-euro (?9) webcam and a PC, making it ideal for interactive, public gaming.

Although the university team do not plan to market the game, Prof Roccetti says their gesture recognition software could be useful in other sectors.

"There are other applications of these technologies which can span from remote medicine to assistance in repairing very complex pieces of cars, aeroplanes or other systems."

"The software could easily be used in museums, schools or exhibitions, allowing people to play games - hands-free and moving their entire bodies - without having to sit in front of their computer screens, " he says, adding that the game received glowing reviews at the Shanghai Expo.

"A journalist from the New Scientist put us in his top ten of the Expo's most interesting innovations".

Pasta-eating diners were enthusiastic about the idea

And what better location to present Tortellino X-perience to the public back home than a traditional Bolognese restaurant?

Diners at the Cantina Bentivoglio were given the chance to try their hand at making virtual tortellini before sitting down to a steaming dish of the real thing.

Raffaella, who has never made pasta before, was enthusiastic: "It was fun and very interesting, and actually making tortellini is a lot easier than I thought it might be."

Meanwhile, Alessandro, who regularly makes his own pasta, found the simulation quite realistic - but much easier than the non-virtual kind.

"If only the stuffing and twisting bit were this simple!" he commented.

Whereas Giacomo was philosophical, saying: "Maybe eating tortellini is easier than making tortellini."

Ironically, the person who found the game hardest was the restaurant's resident pasta maker, Luisa, who had been quietly making hundreds of real tortellini in front of curious onlookers all evening.

"She's been making pasta for 50 years and she's useless at the game!" her boss joked.

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Pasta power

15 June 2011 Last updated at 12:12 GMT By Caroline McClatchey BBC News Magazine Pasta has topped a global survey of the world's favourite foods. So how did the dish so closely associated with Italy become a staple of so many tables around the globe?

While not everyone knows the difference between farfalle, fettuccine and fusilli, many people have slurped over a bowl of spaghetti bolognese or tucked into a plate of lasagne.

Certainly in British households, spaghetti bolognese has been a regular feature of mealtimes since the 1960s. It's become a staple of children's diets, while a tuna-pasta-sweetcorn concoction can probably be credited with sustaining many students through their years at university.

But now a global survey by the charity Oxfam has named pasta as the world's most popular dish, ahead of meat, rice and pizza. As well as being popular in unsurprising European countries, pasta was one of the favourites in the Philippines, Guatemala, Brazil and South Africa.

And figures from the International Pasta Organisation show Venezuela is the second largest consumer of pasta, after Italy. Tunisia, Chile and Peru also feature in the top 10, while Mexicans, Argentineans and Bolivians all eat more pasta than the British.

Continue reading the main story Italy - 26kg per head per yearVenezuela - 12kg Tunisia - 11.7kg Greece - 10.4kgSwitzerland - 9.7kg

Source: International Pasta Organisation, June 2010

Global sales figures reflect the world's love affair with pasta - they have risen from US$13bn (?8bn) in 2003 to US$16bn (?10bn) in 2010. The analysts at Datamonitor predict it will hit US$19bn (?12bn) by 2015, despite rising wheat costs.

Just in the UK, retail sales of dry and fresh pasta amounted to ?53m in 1987. In 2009, the figure was ?282m - include pasta-based ready meals and the value rises to ?800m, says consumer research experts Mintel.

So how did pasta become so popular? It's because it is cheap, versatile and convenient, says Jim Winship, from the UK-based Pizza, Pasta and Italian Food Association. A sauce to go with it can be made from simple ingredients.

"You can create lots of different dishes with it. It tastes good and it's filling. It also has a long shelf life, so you can keep it in the larder until you need to put a meal together."

But that's only part of its success. Pasta is also relatively easy to mass produce and transport around the world, making it a popular product with food companies as well.

'Cultural phenomenon'

"It's always been an industrial product," says John Dickie, professor in Italian Studies at University College London and author of Delizia! A History of the Italians and their Food.

"It is definitely one of the things that has contributed to its success - it's easy to transport and has a long shelf life. It has commercial genes."

Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University London, says technological advances in the 19th Century allowed pasta to be produced on a big scale. But the Industrial Revolution did that for everything else, he adds, and the reason pasta had been particularly successful was because people liked it and the Italian way of life.

"It's a cultural phenomenon, not an industrial phenomenon," he says. "People like the Italian way of life and their simple, staple foods."

Pasta has always had a global aspect as its origins are not purely Italian, which is unsurprising considering it can be made with just wheat and water.

The Greeks and Romans had pasta-like foods but they tended to be baked, not boiled. Ancient China had dumplings, but it's a myth that the Venetian explorer Marco Polo returned from China with pasta in 1295.

The most accepted theory is that the Arab invasions of the 8th Century brought a dried noodle-like product to Sicily. This early pasta was made using flour from durum wheat, which Sicily specialised in. Under Italian law, dry pasta - or pasta secca - can only be made from this type of wheat, and the vast bulk of pasta is still made in Italy.

And despite being considered a cheap meal now it was the preserve of the rich in the very beginning, says Prof Dickie.

"We tend to think of pasta like potatoes but it has never been viewed as a bland staple. It's been associated with prestige - people used to buy votes with pasta."

'Overrated gloppy stuff'

The first reference to pasta in Italy was noted in 1154 and it was about an export factory in Sicily, he says.

He says its breakthrough as a common food came in Naples in the 1700s, when it was recognised as "a good way to feed a large part of the populace".

Continue reading the main story Italy - 3.2m tonnes per year US - 2.6m Brazil - 1.3mRussia - 858,000Switzerland - 607,000

Source: International Pasta Organisation, June 2010

But pasta popularity outside of Italy really took off at the turn of the 20th Century with large-scale Italian immigration to the New World. This is when it started to become known as Italy's national dish, he says.

Italian restaurateur Antonio Carluccio said pasta may have a long history, but the Italians made it their own by eating it with tomatoes.

He says most pasta is spaghetti outside of Italy but there are actually 600 different types and shapes and each region cooks it differently. He says its appeal is in the taste and its nutritional value.

"It is pleasurable with a good sauce, but it should just be coated, otherwise you lose the taste of the pasta. It is a complex carbohydrate which releases all the goodness slowly and you feel satisfied for a long time.

"I don't know one person who doesn't like pasta. It is very similar to bread - both are made with flour and water and they both need an accompaniment."

He's clearly not met food critic and broadcaster Giles Coren, who described pasta as "overrated gloppy stuff" that appeals only to children.

"Ask a footballer what they can cook and they always say spaghetti. It is what you reach for when there is nothing else left in the larder. It's poor people's food and it's unsophisticated. It's the same as bread - you just boil it instead of putting it in the oven."

So as popular as it is, pasta hasn't conquered everyone in the world.

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