Could the world economy produce 60 billion pounds of pasta in 9 months?
the question everyone has been asking
The premise of this post is that advanced lifeforms have invaded Earth. After slicing through humanity’s strongest defenses (Steven Segal, King Tutankhamun’s cursed tomb) they show up at the steps of the UN with their demand. They want 100 billion pounds of pasta. If they don’t receive the pasta, they will crack the whole planet like an egg, drizzle its contents onto Venus and let it fry. With their fate on the line, can the humans of earth put aside their differences and unite for pasta?
The world consumes 17 million tons of pasta per year, or ~35 billion pounds.
The supply chain for basic non-fresh food products looks something like this:
Manufacturers will hold ~1 month of demand in stock.
Food wholesalers typically hold about two weeks of orders.
Food retailers, like grocers, will hold roughly three weeks of sales in stock.
Customers & businesses hold about two weeks of consumption in their pantries.
There’s maybe a few more weeks worth of demand in transit (on ships or trucks).
Therefore at any given time Planet Earth has three months worth of pasta consumption sitting somewhere. That’s ~9 billion pounds. Collecting all that pasta as alien tribute would be logistically difficult, but humanity has proven that it can pool resources and cooperate for important causes like the Eras Tour or proxy wars.
Over the course of a month thousands of pasta-filled trucks & ships arrive in New York City’s ports and are hauled to the aliens occupying the UN. The aliens weigh each bag by hand and beam them up toward their mothership. As expected, they tabulate 9.02 billion pounds of dry pasta.
The aliens then call a meeting with humanity’s leadership committee. The leadership committee is a delegation of eight people elected by a global popular vote to represent Earth. It’s four Indian cricketers and four Chinese influencers.
The aliens are not sated. They tell the committee that 9.02 billion pounds of pasta isn’t enough. If humanity doesn’t deliver another 91 billion pounds of pasta the invaders will line up every living being and punch its stomach through its butt. The committee pleads with the aliens for more time. Virat Kohli, the great Indian cricketer and winner of the global popular vote, is a surprisingly good negotiator. He convinces the aliens to give humanity 9 more months. The aliens spent 45 years traveling to Earth so it’s actually not a big ask (that’s right, there’s a ton of worldbuilding behind this post).
In nine months the world normally produces ~25 billion pounds of pasta. That normal production can be handed right over to the aliens. Humanity can find its calories elsewhere pretty easily. The Italians will suffer the most without their favorite dish but they still have their two other great loves, pizza and deep-rooted misogyny.
Even then, humanity needs to come up with another 66 billion pounds of pasta. Is it possible? Pasta is made of Durum wheat and water. According to world-grain.com Durum wheat is only 5-8% of global wheat production. The crop takes 3-4 months to mature. Wheat farms around the world should be able to quickly switch production to Durum wheat and within 4 months there would be more than enough available to make 66 billion extra pounds of pasta.
The next step is to mill the Durum wheat into pasta dough. ~75% of the world’s wheat is already milled (mostly into flour) so there’s plenty of industrial milling capacity. Milling plants around the world should be able to quickly reconfigure their production lines so that they turn Durum wheat into past dough.
Then the pasta dough has to be extruded into shapes and dried into a cookable form. Extrusion is done by big machines that press, cut, and shape the pasta. These same machines make chips, cereals, pet food, baby food, and all sorts of snacks. Again, the industrial capacity for turning pasta dough into dried pasta is abundant.
Humanity no doubt has the capacity to deliver 100 billion pounds of dried pasta to aliens in a nine month period. Realizing that capacity would mean re-appropriating a significant chunk of global industry in a short period of time. In normal times such an economic reconfiguration would be impractical and unrealistic. However, with aliens threatening to rip out humanity’s collective intestines, string them to the moon like a clothesline, and then hang paper-cut flowers as a decoration and warning to other non-cooperative life forms, humanity is motivated. As such, the global economy would mobilize like never before. Entire supply chains would re-orient around pasta. During WWII automobile factories started rolling out tanks and radio factories became bomb plants. The pasta mobilization would be just like that.
The pasta industrialization would require capital. People can’t farm wheat, mill it, extrude it, or ship it to the UN for free. Similar to wartime, governments would pool taxpayer resources and channel capital into the pasta industry. Governments would pay top dollar for pasta, and then orchestrate the shipping of that pasta to the aliens in the UN. Investments in pasta factories or Durum wheat farms would also be extensively subsidized. Households would grow small batches of wheat and handmake pasta in their kitchens, like the old Victory Gardens. They wouldn’t make much of a dent in overall production but A for effort.
It’s likely that the world ends up producing far more than 100 billion pounds of pasta. Given that anything less than 100 billion pounds leads to a planetary evisceration whereas extra pasta would just mean more food to eat, demand for pasta will be effectively infinite. That’s what happens with circumstances of extreme asymmetric utility. Governments would be desperately printing cash and handing it out to pasta entrepreneurs, pasta war dogs, pasta mobsters, anyone who can deliver even a kilo of the good stuff. The scale would be much larger than COVID stimulus checks and this would inevitably lead to a Keynesian boom. It would be like the roaring twenties. Flush with cash and pasta, people would party late into the night, Bitcoin would kiss new all time highs, and politicians would declare a new golden age of pasta-induced peace & prosperity.
Then it would come to a ripping stop. The aliens would take their fill, leave the planet and suddenly there would be no excess demand for pasta. Humans, having overeaten pasta for 9 months, have grown weary of it. They want back their baguettes, their chips, their hot dog buns. The world is stuck with trillions of dollars invested in pasta-making equipment but no demand for that pasta. It’s a glutenous glut.
Soon after the bills come due. Entrepreneurs who took out loans to build pasta factories, farmers who eroded their soil growing Durum wheat, logistics companies who refitted their trucks and boats to maximize pasta load, they all go bankrupt. Governments went into debt to finance their domestic pasta industries and now face enormous interest costs, a shrinking tax base, and runaway inflation from all the money-printing. A depression engulfs the world, the worst one in a century. The upshot is that, with all this excess pasta-making capacity, pasta is super cheap. Like 25 cents a pound. Of course with unemployment at 45% nobody can afford even that.
It takes almost a decade for the global economy to recover from the pasta depression. Industrial capacity slowly reorients to meet global demand. Governments and businesses gradually digest their debt. It’s a dark and trying time for humanity. Eventually, though, things return to normal. But not for long. Because the aliens, unsated by their pasta tribute, return. This time they want water. They suck up the world’s oceans in a giant hose and then, because they are cruel and unempathetic, use their powerful lasers to push Earth into the Sun, which swallows the pale blue ball in a tiny flicker of light.
**update** Readers keep asking, “what about non-wheat pasta” so I’ll answer here: The aliens have made it very clear that if they receive any non-wheat based noodles they will turn all of humanity into porcelain dolls and then toss them over a waterfall of boulders that exists in an adjacent galaxy. Yes, their technology and knowledge-base is fascinating, but unfortunately these aliens are food motivated and not fulfilled by enlightening primitive species. Surprisingly, the aliens do seem pretty open to different pasta shapes. They even like the Rochetti (humanity’s least favorite pasta). You can read about all this and more in my upcoming 3,000 page novel “Pastacalypse” It’s a deep worldbuilding epic that fleshes out some of the more provocative ideas in this post.