How much is a serving of pasta? It’s not always 2 ounces.

Americans love pasta. Per the National Pasta Association, we consume 5.95 billion pounds of it per year, with the average American enjoying about 20 pounds annually. Is that too much? Too little? Just right? People have lots of thoughts on the topic, especially when it comes to the question of just what constitutes a single serving.

That 2-ounce figure is what nutritional labels on packages of dried pasta call one serving. It amounts to about 1 cup when cooked — and strikes plenty of people as stingy.

“That’s not an entrée,” chef and cookbook author Adrienne Cheatham said to me over the phone. “I’m not going to get full off of that.” Cookbook author Ali Rosen echoed the sentiment: “I have no idea what kind of dainty people we’re expected to be, but I have never in my life split a [1-pound] box of pasta with eight people and felt happy about it.”

The nutrition label serving size, in fact, might not mean what you think it does. “By law, serving sizes must be based on the amount of food people typically consume, rather than how much they should consume,” the Food and Drug Administration states. “The serving size is not a recommendation of how much to eat or drink.”

The last statement bears repeating: The serving size listed on food packaging is NOT a suggestion for how much you should eat for a healthy diet, despite what you might believe. It serves to make sure consumers can fairly compare brands and to prevent manufacturers from trying to game the numbers to make a product look healthier than it might be.

These figures come from a table of reference amounts customarily consumed per eating occasion, which is primarily based on survey data of how much individuals 4 years or older say they typically eat in one sitting. While I’m not trying to start some conspiracy theory that the government is lying to us about these results, remember that such surveys aren’t always reliable because they depend on respondents’ memories of something they may not have even measured at the time they ate it, let alone be able to recall later. “A host of studies of self-reported data have found that up to two-thirds of respondents report eating a diet so inconsistent with their caloric needs as to be implausible,” columnist Tamar Haspel wrote in The Post. Given that the serving size for Oreos is three cookies and for Lay’s Wavy Original Potato Chips is 11, this gives me more reason to think twice about these figures.

At his restaurants, chef Matt Adler uses 4 ounces of dry pasta per dish. “Since it’s restaurant portions, folks need to see value — and especially at Caruso’s Grocery, we feel good with folks having some leftovers to take home,” he messaged me. That’s also roughly the same as what he cooks at home for him and his wife. “That seems to be the amount we feel comfortable eating if it’s our main dish.”

Which brings up another point: Is the pasta meant to be the whole meal, a side dish or just one course out of many? In traditional Italian restaurants, pasta is a course that precedes the entrée, but that’s not how most Americans eat at home. “If I’m making a pasta salad or a side dish, then I can probably get eight portions out of [a one-pound box], maybe a little bit more,” Cheatham said.

Another important consideration is what the pasta is mixed with, be it a simple sauce or if meat and vegetables are included. For something like macaroni and cheese, “1/2 cup to 1 cup is enough because it’s so rich,” Cheatham said.

Lastly, the shape of the pasta itself might play a role. Chef and cookbook author Nini Nguyen takes a firm stance that 1 pound of spaghetti serves six — no more and no less. “I think smaller shapes, you can eat more,” she said. “I don’t know why.”

Ultimately, recipe servings are subjective. Recipe developers come up with them based on how much we think the average human would eat of whatever dish we’ve created, and we try to think in generalities across a broad spectrum of people of varying appetites. In past recipes, I’ve estimated that 8 ounces of pasta can be used to serve anywhere between two and six people. To me, 2 ounces of dry pasta is on the low end of the spectrum, but I typically include it in the range of servings I include for such dishes.

When determining for yourself how much pasta you need to feed a group of people, you can certainly take a 2-ounce serving size into account, but that is only one factor. If the eaters are people you cook for regularly, for instance, you probably already have a good idea of how much they want.

“When I’m cooking for myself and my three little kids, that’s a very different equation than if my husband and brother are joining in,” Rosen texted me. “Those two would eat a pound between the two of them.” And don’t forget that most pasta dishes reheat well. “Lunch leftovers are much better than hungry people who wish they had more pasta!”