This article uses culinary ephemera from 1896 to 1943 to investigate how Italian food companies have historically framed North and East Africa in terms of consumable goods. I anchor this article in the Fascist ventennio, the apex of Italian colonialism.  The introduction examines how dictator Benito Mussolini’s ten-year Battle for Grain (1925-1935) primed the nation – agriculturally, economically, and militarily – to support the invasion of East Africa (1935). Previous scholarship on la cucina coloniale (Emanuela Scarpellini, 2014) provides the broad terms for how Italian empire in Africa was then translated into food via naming practices that conflated the color of food and people, with Assab licorice and Africanette sponge cake becoming popular in continental Italy.  I add to this scholarship with new materials, like pasta packaging and steamship menus, from the Musei delle Aziende chain.  Because the industrialization of major Italian food companies coincided with colonialism, the advertising and packaging of these brands absorbed the racial terms in currency from the 1890s to 1940s.  Rapid commercialization during the Fascist period froze colonial depictions in place, visually connecting dark-colored food products, like coffee and chocolate, with North and East African people (Karen Pinkus, 1995).  Consider, for example, Severo Sepo’s pugno nell’occhio images of cacao laborers produced for Perugina chocolates.  But surprisingly, food companies also used colonial imagery to advertise the most emblematically Italian of foods, like pasta.  To investigate this paradox, an Italian food cast in colonial terms, this article follows the paradoxical entanglement of pasta, as well as grains more largely, including teff, polenta, and coucous, in Italian commercial narratives of empire.  At stake in these inquiry lies the shifting question of national identity as expressed through local cuisine.