Residents of a New Jersey town are stumped after they found about 500lbs of pasta inexplicably dumped next to a local brook.
Last month, Nina Jochnowitz – a former candidate for a seat on the Old Bridge township council – posted pictures on to her Facebook page that showed heaps of spaghetti and macaroni preposterously dumped alongside a bank of Iresick brook.
“A good estimate is more than 500 pounds of pasta dumped,” Jochnowitz wrote on her Facebook page.
The images quickly triggered a slew of reactions online.
Some were humorous. “Cloudy with a chance of meatballs,” one user replied.
Someone else wrote: “I can’t get what’s the problem; just pour a couple buckets of sauce on it and you’re good to go.”
But others criticized the dumping for being wasteful.
One person wrote: “What a disgrace. The spaghetti could have been given to a food pantry or for homeless people.”
Another user said: “So many can’t afford food what a waste. Never mind the threat to the environment.”
For her part, Jochnowitz told National Public Radio that the bizarre episode highlighted how Old Bridge lacks “bulk garbage pickup”.
“It has been a point of contention for the entire time I’ve lived in this town – 23 years,” Jochnowitz, an environmental activist, said to NPR.
The pasta, which appeared to be limp and cooked, was actually uncooked, according to Old Bridge’s business administrator, Himanshu Shah. It simply appeared cooked because of recent rainfall in the area.
“We would estimate several hundred pounds of uncooked pasta that was removed from the packaging and then dumped along the creek,” Shah told CNN in a statement. “It looks like it was only there for a short time, but moisture did start to soften some of the pasta.”
The pasta was eventually cleaned up by public works employees who ended up filling “what appeared to be 15 [wheelbarrow] loads” of the pasta, Shah said.
Some residents think they may have solved the mystery after they discovered that the pile of noodles came from a nearby home that is currently up for sale. After his mother’s death, a military veteran was moving out of his mother’s home when he discovered a stockpile of old pasta in the house.
“I really feel like he was just trying to clear out his parents’ house and they were probably stocked up from” the prior lockdowns associated with Covid-19, the neighbor Keith Rost told NBC New York.
In a statement to CNN, the Old Bridge mayor, Owen Henry, chimed in on the scandal dubbed pasta-gate, saying: “It was a lapse in judgment, because this material could have been disposed of properly.”
