Business & Tech

LGBT Community Says Barilla Can Eat His Words

The CEO of the pasta company says only "classic" families will star in their commercials, and that if gays don't like it, they can eat another pasta. Many are doing just that.

By Gary Jeanfaivre

Comments by the chief executive of pasta giant Barilla are not sitting well with the lesbian, gay bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community, including here in Connecticut. 

In a Thursday interview on Italian radio, Guido Barilla said only traditional families would star in their commercials. "I think the family that we speak to is a classic family," he said. 

Barilla went on to say if gays didn't approve, they could eat another company's pasta. And that's exactly what many are doing. 

Linda Ferraro, an Italian-American mother from Shelton, Connecticut, after learning of Barilla’s remarks, immediately worked with GLAAD to launch a fast-growing Change.org petition asking her neighborhood grocer Stop & Shop to discontinue carrying the “anti-gay pasta.”

The petition is the fastest growing LGBT-related petition in the U.S., getting more than 1,000 signatures in less than 24 hours.

Says Linda in her petition: “As an Italian-American mom, some of my favorite memories are of sitting around the dinner table with my husband and our three sons on Sunday after Church. Lots of tomato sauce, lots of laughs and lots of Barilla. In fact, there are several boxes of Barilla sitting in my cabinet right now. That is about to change.

"My grandparents moved to Brooklyn, NY from Italy and taught me that family is more important than anything. I remembered that tradition when my son Rich was a teenager and cried at our dinner table as he told me he was gay. Even though my sons are adults now, no one messes with any of my boys. I shop at Stop & Shop, and now that I dumped Barilla, I think they should, too.”

In a Facebook post, the Norwalk-based Triangle Community Center shared a link to an article on Human Rights Campaign, called "Five Pasta Brands That Support LGBT Equality."

"We're guessing that after hearing some of the remarks recently made by the Chairman of Barilla US Pasta you may be looking for some alternative brands."

A Long Island businessman who is a gay father of five children was not so kind in his reaction.

"The only way for Barilla to get ahead of this is to either fire their idiot chairman or do exactly what he said they would never do, which is run a television commercial that features a gay family. This is going to hurt Barilla's bottom line."

The largest petition (10,000+ signatures in less than 24 hours) was launched by Dario Fo, an Italian Nobel Prize winner, director, and actor who starred in Barilla's first TV commercials, where he saw first-hand how the brand was “synonymous with Italy, with home, and with family.”

The petition asks Guido to “return to the spirit of those commercials” and “become an ambassador of equality and a voice of the present” by  producing advertising that includes gay families

What do you think?

— Patch Editor David Reich Hale contributed to this article.

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