Unusual discovery: Who left hundreds of pounds of cooked pasta in the New Jersey woods?

A city in New Jersey is trying to solve the mystery behind hundreds of pounds of cooked pasta that inexplicably appeared last week along a creek in a forest before the city cleaned up the "macaroni mess."

Mounds of spaghetti and other kinds of pasta, including ziti, were apparently thrown down the creek near Veterans Park in Old Bridge, according to images posted by resident Nina Jochnowitz last Wednesday.

Jochnowitz, a former council candidate, estimated that over 500 pounds of pasta must have remained, in a Facebook post where she shared photos of the sauceless noodles.

Her post was quickly captured and shared on Reddit and Twitter, where people from all over joked about the pasta fiasco and theorized its origin story with almost endless puns and wordplay.

someone very mysteriously dumped 3-400 pounds of pasta in the woods in old bridge, nj …… i need to know everything pic.twitter.com/z6D1e7u2JJ

— soup girl (@worrystonee) May 2, 2023

The person responsible for the mess has not yet been found, according to Jochnowitz. 

A Reddit user speculated a possible motive.

"It was the expiration date of the pasta," he said.

Jochnowitz also found humor in the strange incident of littering, however, she said that the so-called pasta dump illustrates the larger problem that Old Bridge faces with illegal dumping and lack of bulk garbage collection.

Shortly after Jochnowitz posted about the terrible experience and reported the food waste to the municipality, the town's Department of Public Works hurried to the scene and cleaned up the noodles.

"You could say, 'Who cares about the pasta?' But the pasta has a pH level that will affect the stream," she told the Inquirer. "It's important to clean that stream because it feeds the city's water supply... It was one of the fastest cleanups I've seen here."