Reported today on The New York Times
For the full article visit:
My Cookie’s Better Than Yours: Italy Is in a Hazelnut Cream-Filled Civil War With Italians’ appetite for snack food growing, Barilla and Ferrero are in a pitched battle to make sure their cookies come out on top. MILAN – As Marianna Farina and her husband did some Christmas shopping on a windy night in Milan, she noticed lots of people walking around with small brown packages of cookies. “I was curious,” she said. “Because I had heard about the cookie wars.” She had found her way to a promotional pavilion set up to hype the introduction of Pan di Stelle Biscocrema, a new hazelnut cream-filled cookie by the venerable Italian breakfast brand, famous for its round cocoa cookies dotted with 11 white sugar stars. About a month earlier, Nutella, the juggernaut of hazelnut spreads, had encroached on Pan di Stelle’s turf by introducing, after what the company said were 10 years and 120 million euros (about $133 million) in research and development, Nutella Biscuits. Ms. Farina had tried and liked them. Now she bit into the Pan di Stelle cookie. She liked it, too.”It’s a tough one,” she said.In the popular imagination, Italy is a country of ripe tomatoes, fresh pasta, virgin olive oil and other staples of the Mediterranean diet. In practice, increasingly corpulent Italians – and especially Italian children – are united by an insatiable hunger for snack food.Children eat cookies for breakfast. So do many of their parents. The supermarket aisles are full of breakfast cookies and snacks called merendine, which, generally speaking, are industrialized miniatures of traditional Italian cakes and tarts. It’s all more Hostess than homemade, but, in a country of regional cuisines, it is also the sugary, sticky stuff that binds.The populist leader Matteo Salvini has made a habit of bin