20th September: Everything I Have I Owe to Spaghetti Day

Today is Everything I Have I Owe to Spaghetti Day so here are ten things you might not know about spaghetti:

1. Dried spaghetti is made from milled Wheat and Water, Fresh spaghetti contains Eggs as well.
2. Industrially produced spaghetti is 25 centimetres long. Too big for most saucepans, but experts say it shouldn't be broken up to fit, but rather added slowly to boiling water as it softens.
3. Spaghetti is the plural form of the Italian word spaghetto, a diminutive of spago, meaning "thin string" or "twine".
4. Spaghetti was probably first made in Sicily around the 12th century.
5. Some spaghetti records: the largest ever bowl of spaghetti was created in 2010; a Californian restaurant, Buca di Beppo filled a swimming pool with around 6.250 kg of pasta; the longest strand of spaghetti ever was produced in Ober Ramstadt, Germany and was 455m long; and the current world record for eating spaghetti is held by a Tuscan man who ate 100 grams in 33 seconds.
6. Unsurprisingly, Italy is the world's leading producer of spaghetti. In 2008 Italy exported 1.7million tonnes of the stuff. The biggest importers of pasta are the United States, Germany, UK and France. The USA also produces its own, since the first US spaghetti factory opened in Brooklyn in 1848.
7. Spaghetti contains fat, carbohydrates (fibre and sugar), proteins, magnesium and Iron. There are 158 calories in 100 grams of spaghetti.
8. One of the most popular spaghetti dishes is spaghetti bolognaise. If you want to eat this dish in Bologna, where it originated, you won't find it on a menu, because there, they call it tagliatelle al ragù.
9. The BBC television programme Panorama featured a hoax program about the spaghetti harvest in Switzerland on April Fools day, 1957, showing people picking spaghetti from spaghetti trees.
10. Spaghetti westerns don't really have anything to do with spaghetti. "Spaghetti" was a kind of nickname for Italy at the time, where those movies were made.