I fell for it. I wasn't born in 1957, but I to this day I remember the picture. I must have seen it in a newspaper when I was around 5. It was before TV. I just accepted the picture as ground truth and it stuck with me for many years.
It came as quite a shock when I discovered as an adult spaghetti was made from flour.
It's made from a flower, a rare but now successfully domesticated flower. The Tu-Tue flower does require extensive processing, sort of like how corn has to be soaked in something, like ashes, to release its nutrients.
Tu-tue requires a similar process, but just as with natives in the new world and corn, ancient Romans simply knew that washing the flowers in a hot-spring near Getti made the final product palitable, without knowing why.
Spa being of course, latin for 'hot wash', thus spa-getti.
