I saw the photos first: tan, straggly piles along the banks of an otherwise fertile stream. My mind went to worms, and then gnats. I once wrote an article about fungus gnats, the larvae of which sometimes form circles to travel. Was I looking at something like that? A natural phenomenon that covered the stream in thousands of brown, straw-like creatures?

Nope. I was looking at pasta.

Residents of Old Bridge, New Jersey were presented with a mystery this week: Who dumped mounds of pasta in the forest, all along the stream?

The saga began earlier in the week when resident Nina Jochnowitz alerted town officials to the bountiful mess after receiving a complaint from a neighbor. Reportedly, it was loose spaghetti, alphabet noodles, and elbow macaroni.

“There was literally 25 feet of pasta that had been dumped,” she told The New York Times.

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