(Trends Wide) — For many people, pasta is a sacred food. And New Jerseyans especially revere her, since, according to census data, more than a million residents have Italian roots (including the fictional Tony Soprano).
So why would someone dump hundreds of pounds of pasta in the woods of the State Gardens, denying it the chance to be in all its glory on a plate laden with sauce and Parmesan cheese?
The residents of Old Bridge, New Jersey, have been asking this question in recent days, although part of the mystery may have been solved.
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The incident gained momentum when Ali Allocco, a Philadelphia resident living in New Jersey, posted on his Twitter account on Tuesday a screenshot of a New Jersey Reddit page about the pasta incident. The topic quickly gained interest, racking up more than 5 million views and more than 4,500 retweets as of Friday afternoon.
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
— pasta girl (@worrystonee) May 2, 2023
Nina Jochnowitz, an Old Bridge resident running for city council in 2021, posted photos of the pasta dumped in a forest on her Facebook page and community group pages.
The images show piles of macaroni and noodles along the bank of a stream in the township.
On Friday morning, Jochnowitz said he had gone to the scene to take photos after being told by a neighbor.
“They did it with an old method, that is, they threw it into the forest, like everyone else does,” he explained.
The 23-year-old resident said she contacted the municipal authorities, but Old Bridge does not have its own landfill and uses private companies to collect rubbish.
“When you don’t have a service to get rid of junk, people do it the best way they can for themselves,” Jochnowitz said.
As for who would throw away kilos of the Italian pantry staple, Jochnowitz described the person as “a neighborhood resident who was emptying out a lot of pasta.” He declined to identify him, out of consideration for the family.
“He had a very large collection of pasta, and it basically ended up at our feet,” he said.
Himanshu Shah, the Old Bridge business manager, confirmed in a statement to Trends Wide on Thursday that “several hundred kilos” of pasta had been dumped and that it was, in fact, all raw.
“We estimate that there are several hundred kilos of raw pasta that was taken out of its packaging and dumped in the stream. It seems like it was only there for a short time, but the moisture started to soften some of the pasta,” according to Shah. Last weekend it rained a lot in the area.
On April 28, the police were dispatched to the area. Later, two public works employees came to the site to clean it up, according to Shah.
The Old Bridge Public Works Department picked up “what appeared to be 15 truckloads of illegally dumped pasta along a creek in a residential neighborhood,” Shah said.
The township police department is now investigating the incident, according to the statement.
In comments on the events on Friday, Old Bridge Mayor Owen Henry said if the individual had called to ask what to do with the pasta, the municipality could have suggested other options, such as taking it to a food bank.
“It was a judgment call, because this material could have been properly removed,” he said. Henry added that the cleanup took about two hours.
A neighborhood resident, Keith Rost, 33, who came across the piles of pasta while walking on a path, said public works employees picked up the macaroni with a machine.
“They had a little machine that would pick up the macaroni and they spent about two hours cleaning the trail that day,” he explained.
Like Jochnowitz, Rost declined to name the culprit, but said he had heard from neighbors that the paste may have accumulated over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic.
