Move over Met Gala cockroach, your five minutes of fame are up.
Now, a mountain of pasta dumped in a forest in New Jersey is setting the internet alight with plenty of humorous reactions, puns and attempts to solve the mystery.
The discovery, estimated to weigh more than 200kg, was found near a creek close to Veterans Park in Old Bridge. The noodles had been left alongside a stream, which residents told US media was often used as a dumping place for rubbish and construction materials.
Former local council candidate Nina Jochnowitz visited the site and posted pictures on Facebook appealing for help to find the perpetrator.
“There was literally 25 feet of pasta that had been dumped,” she told the New York Times.
The story was posted to Reddit and Twitter, where it trended under the hashtag #pastagate, and quickly went viral as keyboard wits and online sleuths traded puns and evidence trying to figure out who ditched the noodles and why.
Although the pasta appeared to have been cooked and dumped, authorities later said the pasta had been left there uncooked and that damp weather had softened it so that it appeared to have been boiled.
Along with spaghetti, there was an array of different pasta types, including macaroni and alphabet-shaped pieces.
New Jersey is famously home to a large Italian-American community and many TV shows and films, including The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire and Ramy, are set in the state.
Theories about how and why the food was left in the forest include a catering company whose client cancelled a large order, or that the pasta had expired and a restaurant or hotel decided to dump it rather than throw it away.
Authorities cleared away the noodles soon after Jochnowitz’s post, with town business administrator Himanshu Shah sending out an email titled “Pasta Dumping”, stating that the pasta had been "properly disposed of".
Jochnowitz later told The New York Times that she had found out who dumped the food, saying: “I only know that it was not a business. It was a private residence, and I’m in conversation with the family via an individual who knows the family.”
Whoever it is, perhaps they should spend some time in the state penne-tentiary.
Here, The National rounds up some of the best puns, jokes and reactions to #pastagate.
This mafia reference
The pasta-bilities for puns are endless
Obligatory gabagool riff
All the puns
The usual suspects
Shhhh! Don't wake the spaghetti monsters
Excellent Godfather pun
Hollywood marketing?
Yes, they can(nelloni)
Italian nonnas weigh in
