“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 and replaced the broken part.  When lifted the top and showed it to Sophie, her eyes went wide behind her glasses. She didn’t know at first whether she was looking at spaghetti 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. Consequently, they 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 the spaghetti egg. Sophie wrote a screenplay for it and developed it 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. The concept was based on gene editing chickens—using CRISPR technology—to produce oodles of eggs packed with pasta-shaped proteins and marinara-like yolk.  Mass production, however, came only 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 this 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.