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The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest of 1957

Spaghetti, as everyone knows, is Italian cuisine.  The word spaghetti itself is Italian for little strings.  Yet for an import, it’s pretty ubiquitous outside of Italy.  All over Europe and the Americas, spaghetti is one of the most popular dishes.  Many of us grew up with it, whether or not we have any Italian ancestry.  All the same, it still registers as a foreign dish.   With all the Italian immigrants to the United States, it’s hardly surprising that this simple yet versatile dish caught on here, but it still had to be new at one point.  Exactly when spaghetti stopped being an outsider food and started ranking as comfort food for Americans is hard to pin down.  It probably started around the time we stopped seeing Italians as outsiders who were threatening our way of life.  The Immigrant Exclusion Act of 1924, which effectively stopped (legal) Italian immigration to the United States, was just a symptom of a rising anti-foreigner sentiment.  The trumped-up charges again