Kicker: Pasta puzzle

NICK EICHER, HOST: Perhaps you saw the story last week of that huge pile of pasta mysteriously dumped in the woods. Keith Rost of Old Bridge, New Jersey, is the one who deserves credit for finding the trove. Audio here from NBC News, New York:

KEITH ROST: I was just going through the trails. So I looked down seen alphabets, noodles, spaghetti probably about 200 pounds.

The story was all over social media--many wondering where it came from.

NEW YORK NEWSCAST: We have some answers related to what you could call a macaroni mystery.

Mmm-hmm and we do. Apparently a neighbor of Rost died and her son was cleaning out her kitchen when he came across a stash of dry goods.

ROST: They were of a generation like my grandparents—always had a cupboard full of cans and pasta and you know, just to be safe.

So he tossed it in the woods. Obviously, he was unfamiliar with the old saying, “a penne saved is a penne earned.”

Hang on, it gets worse.

This story went viral and drew all kinds of social media commentary, to wit: Who did this? Al-Dente and his partner in crime Lynn Guini?

Well, it turned out the guy who dumped the pasta wasn’t the one who cleaned it up. It was the city having to send a clean-up crew.

Now, there are so many pasta-bilities of how to end this story. But to my mind, this is a classic case of moral hazard. The city is going to be back cleaning up some other mess, they might as well say “pasta, la vista, baby.”

It’s The World and Everything in It.

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