The same day (March 23, 2023) that Italy submitted pasta carbonara for inclusion on Unesco’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage, the Financial Times published an article in which Italian culinary expert Alberto Grandi claimed that carbonara was developed by Americans residing in Italy shortly after WWII. The claim sparked outrage throughout Italy. “A surrealist attack!” – said the agriculture organisation Coldiretti, as heated social media discussion ensued nationwide, according to a BBC article. So who really created the original carbonara? Italian food author Eleonora Cozzella says, “It was a combination of Italian genius and American resources.” Cozzella spent six years covering National Carbonara Day on April 6, and eventually wrote The Perfect Carbonara, which earned a Gourmand World Cookbook Award in 2020, says the BBC. Read More: Activists target Salt Bae’s upscale London steakhouse She interviewed the descendants of innkeepers who fed American soldiers in the neighborhood of Trastevere, just over the Tiber river in Rome, in the late 1940s. US soldiers apparently asked for “spaghetti breakfast” that should have eggs and bacon. Even during the desperate times, Italians could acquire military rations in the black market, including bacon from Americans and egg powder from the British. In 1952, the first recipe for pasta carbonara was published in the United States. Author Patricia Bronté mentioned the Italian restaurant Armando’s, run by chefs Pietro Lencioni and Armando Lorenzini, among her favorite spots in her book “Vittles and Vice: An Incredible Guide to What’s Cooking on Chicago’s Near North Side”. She included recipe of the restaurant’s famous dish, carbonara. “No one has a trademark on the recipe,” Alessandro Pipero, chef of the Michelin-starred restaurant Pipero in Rome and one of the “carbonara kings” told BBC. “Honestly, I don’t care who invented it,” he said. The first Italian recipe for carbonara was published in August 1954 in La Cucina Italiana magazine. “And it is a strange one,” Cozzella said in the BBC report. “It has parsley and even gruyere as cheese!” Read More: Homemade Ice Cream Recipes Using Seasonal Fruits for This Summer  “This debate is ridiculous and dangerous,” said Michele Fino, a law professor at Pollenzo's University of Gastronomic Sciences, calling it “old news”. According to Fino, the discussion is harmful because a toxic type of nationalism may be lurking between the pecorino and a piece of guanciale, or maybe deep inside the tubular rigatoni. “It is a sort of banal nationalism that runs through food,” he told BBC. “People consider it unimportant, but it creates a certain climate – we shouldn’t ignore it.”