Would you believe?

When Andrew Jackson was running for President in 1828, his opponents called him a stubborn jackass. Jackson was proud that he was known for obstinately sticking to his guns, so he started using the image of a donkey on his campaign materials. The Democrats have been using that symbol ever since.

I think Marco Polo introduced pasta to Italy after returning from China.

Long before paper, gunpowder and the compass, the Chinese had invented yet another staple of human civilization. A coil of dry noodles, preserved for 4,000 years, sat beneath an overturned earthenware bowl at an archaeological site in northeastern China. In 2005, archaeologists discovered the spaghettilike tangle, effectively settling the score about whether the Chinese, Italians or Arabs began producing pasta first [source: BBC].

Instead of being made from ground wheat, as most pasta is, those ancient noodles were prepared from another cereal grass called millet. Although not native to their country, the Chinese later began growing wheat in the northern regions along the Yellow River by 3000 B.C. The first written records of a mixture called bing appeared between the fourth and second century B.C. [s­ource: Serventi, Sabban and Shugaar]. Bing referred to all products made from wheat dough, including breads and pastas. Around 300 B.­C., the Chinese scholar Shu Xi wrote an ode dedicated to the culinary cornerstone, describing the "fine and thin" bing stuffed with pork and mutton [source: Serventi, Sabban and Shugaar].

­By the time Marco Polo arrived in China in 1274, the Chinese had well established their pasta cuisine. The medieval Chinese didn't cook pasta from dried strands, like the kind we buy from the grocery store. Instead, theirs always was made from fresh dough. They also isolated gluten, the compound in wheat that provides elasticity for kneading and stretching, and created pastas from different starches, such as rice and soybeans.

In the 17 years that Marco Polo ­spent in China, dining with the likes of Kublai Khan, he certainly sampled the various forms of Asian pasta. According to one edition of Marco Polo's "Description of the World," which the Venetian merchant wrote after returning home from the East, he ate dishes similar to macaroni during his stint. From that brief mention, a legend arose that the famed explorer must've introduced pasta to Italy. What else could explain the gastronomical bridge between two distant countries?

But as any gourmand worth an ounce of orzo will quickly tell you, there isn't a grain of truth to Polo as the pasta pioneer.

"Noodles" were konew in Italy (and even before in Greece) long before Marco Polo's travels. (And there are some doubts, if he really has been as far as China.)

Explorer Marco Polo 'never actually went to China

Sorry, Walter, that site is not current. I found this one:

7/24/00 issue of USN&WR

The fabulous fabulist
Did Marco Polo really make it to China?

BY LEWIS LORD

MUSEO CORRER, VENICE, ITALY - GIRAUDON/ART RESOURCE The moviegoers of 1938 who absorbed The Adventures of Marco Polo could see that the storied Italian was a bold and suave globetrotter. Otherwise, Gary Cooper, in the title role, would never have discovered China, fireworks, and an emperor's daughter, whom he taught how to kiss in the best European manner. The question today involves another character trait: Could Marco Polo tell the truth?

Ask his 13th-century contemporaries, and the answer would be a resounding no. They expected visitors to the unknown East to bring back tales of people born with one leg or one eye, or with the head beneath the shoulders. Polo's 1298 book, The Travels of Marco Polo, offered no such oddities. Instead, it told Europeans something they refused to believe. The civilization of the West, Polo implied, was second-rate. China, by contrast, was a place with its act decidedly together, a country with hundreds of thriving towns and cities far richer in goods, services, and technology than any place in Europe.

Priestly request. But rather than reject Polo's account, Westerners embraced it–as a romantic fantasy. It became Europe's most widely read book, thanks to such details as Polo's description of China's Kublai Khan as the world's strongest leader, a chivalrous "Lord of Lords" who employed 10,000 falconers and 20,000 dog handlers and hosted banquets with 40,000 guests. In 1324, as Polo lay on his deathbed, a priest beseeched him to retract his "fables." His reply: "I have not told half of what I saw." Polo started seeing the world at 17, when he left Venice with his father and his uncle for China to visit Kublai Khan, whom the two older men had met on a Chinese trading mission.

The three Polos were gone 24 years, 17 of which, they said, were spent in China, where the khan sent Marco on official tours of his empire. The book Polo produced, with the help of a fiction writer named Rustichello, gave Europe its first description of China.

Now, seven centuries later, Polo's credibility again is under attack. According to critics, he never even set foot in China. Had he been there, they argue, he would have reported important aspects of 13th-century Chinese life that went unmentioned. Among his omissions: tea drinking, calligraphy, the binding of women's feet to keep them small, and, most glaring, the Great Wall of China.

The controversy bubbled up in a 1995 book–Did Marco Polo Go to China?–by Frances Wood, head of the British Library's Chinese department. Wood notes Polo's omissions and argues that he probably never got beyond Persia. His China stay, she suggests, was fabricated with the help of Arabs and Persians who had visited China. She also points out that Polo is not mentioned in any Chinese records. But if past is prologue, Polo's reputation will emerge in fine shape. A century after he was ridiculed as "the man of a million lies," a Renaissance geographer hailed him as "the most diligent investigator of eastern shores." Another reader, Christopher Columbus, sailed west in hopes of finding a better route to the riches Polo described in the East.


Today, reference books state flatly that Polo went to China, even though flaws in his story have been known for centuries. In 1747, the British book Astley's Voyages asked: "Had our Venetian been really on the Spot ... how is it possible he could have made not the least Mention of the Great Wall: the most remarkable Thing in all China or perhaps in the whole World?" The answer, Polo's supporters say, is simple: In his day, the Great Wall wasn't all that great. First built 300 years before the birth of Christ, much of it had crumbled by the 13th century. "Almost everything the tourist is normally shown today was built in the 16th century," notes historian John Larner, author of the new book Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World.

Tea time? Larner also downplays other omissions. Tea drinking was popular in southern China in Polo's time, he says, but had yet to catch on in the north and central regions, where Polo resided. Foot binding, Larner reports, was limited "to upperclass ladies ... confined to their houses." Only rarely would anyone see them except kin.

To Polo's backers, what's most telling is what he did say. His main point–that a rich urban civilization existed in the East– was precisely on target. In the 19th century, British explorers followed his Silk Road route and were amazed at how many details he got right. Their trip, one wrote, threw "a promise of light even on what seemed the wildest of Marco's stories." One bizarre report from the Silk Road told of a giant sand dune that made rumbling sounds.

Today, in a Chinese desert, guides point to what Polo apparently saw–the Mingsha Dune–and explain that when the wind blows, the dune whistles because solid granite is just below the shifting sand. At another Silk Road site, locals still cross a river on rafts of inflated pigskins, just as described by Polo 700 years ago.

While Polo said nothing about calligraphy, he did tell the West about paper money, which China had used for centuries. From Polo, the West learned of China's "large black stones which ... burn away like charcoal." Centuries later, Europeans would come to know the substance as coal. Polo also told quite a few whoppers–so many that English schoolboys used to greet exaggerations with the words: "It's a Marco Polo." Although he never visited Japan, he reported its royal palace roofed in gold. He claimed to have been Kublai Khan's military adviser in a Chinese siege that occurred, it turns out, before his reported time in China. In fact, Polo may have done much less for the khan than he claimed. Perhaps that's why Chinese records ignore him.

But even Polo's No.1 critic, Wood, deems him a useful "recorder of information," similar to the Greek historian Herodotus, "who did not travel to all the places he described and who mixed fact with fantastic tales." Historians consider Herodotus "the father of history." Polo, scholars agree, opened vistas to the medieval mind and stirred the interest in exploration that prompted the age of the European ocean voyages. Whether he told only half of what he saw, or saw merely half of what he told, the fact remains: He made history happen.

Actually, it's a newspaper report as of last monthe ( 09 Aug 2011, see my source). I have my doubts that something published 11 years earlier is "more current"!

And those findings were published in the September issue of "Focus Storia", an Italian history magazine, by Danielle Petrella of the University of Naples, et. al. .

Danielle's findings may mean that one of the world's greatest travel books was just a gripping work of fiction.

No, in a word.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasta

I'd long heard it was introduced to the peninsula known now as Italy by the arabs.

Sorry, meant the August edition:


Summary:

Indeed "macaroni" comes from the Sicilian word "maccaruni" which translates as "made into a dough by force".
(The Arab geographer Al Idrisi [1099–1165] wrote that a flour-based product in the shape of strings was produced in Palermo, then an Arab colony.)

I erred by saying peninsula, as I knew it was Sicily, an island now part of Italy - though I've know of Sicilians who think the separation is more than the strait of Messina.

Similarly,
The chinese, persians, and the arabs were early in playing around with snow and fruit.. according to wiki, the arabs the ones to first use milk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream

When the two-and-one-half-hour finale of the ground-breaking television show "M.A.S.H." aired on February 28, 1983, advertisers paid a hefty $450,000 for a single 30-second spot. That was $50,000 more than the same spot cost at the Super Bowl that year.

That's not a new revelation. I knew that origin story back in elementary school.

At least how we were told, Marco Polo brought pasta to the old world.

Are we talking in terms of inflationary adjusted prices?

Did you know that the people of Venice, Italy have an app on their phones to predict the sea level rise so they can prepare for floods? They check it as often as the weather, apparently.

(Things you learn by watching Bill Nye Saves the World)