A viral incident involving 227kg of dumped pasta has put a strain on a small New Jersey town.
Residents of Old Bridge were left baffled when hundreds of kilos of cooked spaghetti and elbow macaroni were left along a creek last week.
Photos of the bizarre event were first shared on Facebook last Friday by Nina Jochnowitz, a resident who previously ran for city council in the town of 66,000.
"This week, there was a new type of dumping, of excessive food, PASTA," she wrote in a post, "A good estimate is more than 500 pounds (227kg) of pasta dumped adjacent to the streams."
The next day, a rapid clean-up operation cleared away the perplexing pasta, a job a friend of hers described as "Mission Impastable".
Today, the culprit remains un-aldente-fied.
Three days after the clean-up, Jochnowitz's pictures were shared on the r/newjersey subreddit, a Reddit page with 423,000 users, where theories and puns about the incident came to a boil.
One user alluded to a post on r/HealthyFood four days earlier, where a user claimed their husband accidentally ordered 44kg of spaghetti.
"This has to be the most NJ crime that has ever been done," one person wrote.
"We should send the perpetrators to the state penne tentiary," another joked.
The mystery soon reached Twitter, where one user - appropriately named pasta girl - shared the conspiracy, gaining over 35,000 likes.
"I need to know everything," she wrote.
"Not a lot of Italian restaurants around that area. My guess would be the Moose Lodge did it. Often times they have events," one replier theorised.
A city spokesperson told The Philadelphia Inquirer that the incident was being investigated.
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