“Spaghetti Egg” by Dan Grossman

“Spaghetti Egg” illustration by Harry Kim

Spaghetti Egg

I played a practical joke on my niece and nephews at my parents’ house in San Diego. I punched a small hole in the top of an eggshell and emptied the contents onto a pan for my morning omelet. I inserted an egg’s worth of leftover spaghetti and sauce into the empty shell.  When I showed it to Sophie, her eyes went wide behind her glasses. She didn’t know at first whether I was pulling out spaghetti noodles or alien worms. Her two brothers, Harry and Jesse, were playing a game of chess at the time. They forgot their game and stared at the object in my hand. What was their devious uncle up to? Well, at the moment, I was plucking the noodles out of the egg, one at a time, and slipping them into my mouth. In the end, of course, I let them know how I messed with the egg. But all of them lost their appetite for the lunch my sister was making, tuna salad I think it was. Nevertheless, the spaghetti egg stayed with them. Harry drew a cartoon creature based on a spaghetti egg. Sophie wrote a screenplay for it. It was developed into a big-box-office-creature-feature. But Jesse, the computer whiz that he is, took the whole thing one step further. He started a spaghetti egg production company based on gene editing chickens—using CRISPR technology—to produce oodles of eggs packed with pasta-shaped proteins and marinara-like yolk. This result came about after decades of experimentation and billions of dollars spent. The eggs were banned in all nations except Scotland where they somehow caught on. (Analysts attribute that development to the Scottish love of slimy breakfast food.)  I don’t know what might have happened with their lives if I hadn’t introduced them to spaghetti eggs. I mean, I did it all in good fun. But, as Sigmund Freud once said, there’s no such thing as a joke.