The Catch Will Be the Meatballs

Since time immemorial, or at least since the noodle was invented, there have been only two socially acceptable ways for adults to eat spaghetti. There is the genteel method of holding a fork in one hand, a spoon in the other, and twirling the pasta into a little ball that can be slid into the mouth with only slight risk of embarrassing mishap. Or a fork is used to chop the spaghetti into little pieces for easier pickup and delivery, similarly a method likely to leave no unsightly remnants behind.

But now, in mankind’s ever-upward march toward progress, comes news of a third, non-messy method for consuming noodles. Nicholas A. Ruggieri of Rochester, N.Y. has even been granted a patent for his spaghetti sipper, which, it must be said at the onset, isn’t for any old kind of spaghetti. It requires a single continuous strand, yards and yards of it, like dental floss. Once that’s obtained, the cooked pasta and its sauce are put inside a deep cup-like container with one end of the spaghetti strand fed up through a straw to the lid. The spaghetti is then sipped, like a milkshake.

A classic example of building a better mousetrap? Perhaps, but the sipper does strike us something that might find favor with drivers who like to consume a meal as they ply the freeway. Drivers who feed as they speed have always seemed to us to be a particular hazard. But if dining on the freeways is going to happen, we suppose it’s preferable that it be done with meals that can be held in one hand. Safe noodling, as it were.