I don't have any figures to back this up, but I have a feeling that pasta is on the brink of passing out potatoes as our main carbohydrate. Spuds have a bit more dietary fibre than pasta, but there seems to be little to choose between the two if you're concerned about the glycaemic index of what you eat.
This is surely a disappointment to those of us who were brought up on potatoes and who eagerly await the first of the home-grown earlies. If you have a few in the garden, and have managed to avoid blight, there are few things more atavistically satisfying than removing the plump tubers from the dark earth and steaming them straight away.
I gather that fresh new potatoes have a lower GI than the stored ones from last season, but I wish they were better than pasta in this respect. It's unfair that a crop on which I have lavished elbow grease, manure and backache should be as capable of elevating your blood sugar as the refined carbohydrate of man-made pasta.
But pasta, when it's good, is one of the great basic foods. Unfortunately, it is very rarely good outside its homeland. The kind of pasta that is sweeping Ireland is generally pretty vile, the sort of thing that moves from a state of hardness to pure mush in nanoseconds.
The best pasta, contrary to what a lot of us think, can be either fresh or dried. But it has to be made with skill and care. That's the problem. And if you want the real thing, made with organic flour and free range eggs, a trip to Ristorante Romano, on Capel Street in Dublin, will prove an inexpensive treat.
Ristorante Romano, I should stress, is not fashionable. It is untouched by the hand of any interior designer. The extremely low light, especially if you sit towards the back, conceals the naffness of the decor. But only slightly. You don't go to Ristorante Romano for the kind of modern Italian stuff made fashionable by the likes of the River Café. You go for the fresh pasta and because a two-course lunch costs €9.95.
The trick is to order the salad - a generous helping of lettuce, cucumber, tomato and freshly sliced red onion that you dress yourself - not as a starter but to be served with the main course of pasta. That's what we did the other day. We had spaghetti Bolognese, a combination of pleasantly chewy pasta and a dark sauce that was big on beef and easy on the tomatoes; and a bowl of penne, bright yellow from the egg content, tossed with good olive oil, lightly fried garlic and chilli, with a few black olives for a salty, fruity tang. Simple and scrumptious.
This may not have been the most sophisticated lunch, but it was great in its own way, not least because it was all freshly prepared - a shocking number of restaurants reheat partly cooked pasta that they have bought in, along with the sauces - and because it was cheap.
We could have stopped there, of course, and kept the cost down. But because even the desserts are freshly made on the premises - a real rarity - we finished with ripe bananas, flambeed and served in a citrusy syrup, and a hunk of very proper tiramisu, a useful index of a kitchen's deftness.
With a brace of authentically short double espressos, mineral water and a juicy Chianti, the bill for this lunchtime blowout was €63.20, including friendly, chatty service. Ristorante Romano demonstrates that real food doesn't have to be expensive. And you don't have to eat the decor.
Ristorante Romano, 12 Capel Street, Dublin 1, 01-8726868