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‘Fake’ carbonara sauce causes outrage in Italy
(edition.cnn.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2025
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Good to know italy has solved literally all the important problems.
Have you tried real carbonara? It's not the same as this ready made goop.
Just to clarify: selling this fake carbonara is fine, I'm even sure it tastes fine. But calling it carbonara (without weasel-words like carbonara-style or some such) absolutely is a problem.
In my country (which is not Italy) the popular variant is making it with whipped cream, which again, tastes fine, but it's not carbonara, but many restaurants have the fake carbonara on their menu labeled as normal carbonara, which totally sucks. And shit like these glasses with fake carbonara just makes this worse.
Labeling for food is protected in Europe for this exact reason. It's done for lots of food from parmesan to champagne.
Even Wikipedia lists pancetta as an acceptable variant for carbonara.
If the definition is so important to Italy, they shouldn't be complaining to a supermarket, but should ensure the naming is protected, which unlike champagne or parmesan, does not seem to be the case for carbonara (probably because it's a style of dish and doesn't reference a place of origin).