Splat! * Spaghetti

Image: Results of the Spaghetti Experiment

Spaghetti is a common staple in just about any household. Pasta has been a far-reaching food for centuries; it has been around in America since the country's beginning. In fact, the man who owned one of the very first pasta factories in America dried spaghetti noodles on the roof of his house for lack of better technology. Anyone who has ever eaten spaghetti can attest to the fact that it is extremely messy. There is something about the red-staining sauce and the flimsy, flicking noodles which creates a splattering mess whether you are slurping the noodles up or throwing them down. For this reason, I decided to make spaghetti one of the three different foods to test against the others to see which created the largest splatter. Spaghetti was a beneficial choice because of its simplicity; whether you are boiling noodles and dumping a jar of sauce on them or buying a can of spaghetti like I did for this experiment, spaghetti is one of the simpler foods to attain. Thus, it presented a large opportunity for very little effort.

Image: Results

At the end of the experiment, I determined that spaghetti had the largest splatter. The three trials produced lengths of 2.5 feet, 1.5 feet, and 1 foot. Thus, the mean of the lengths of the splatters for the spaghetti trials was 1.67 feet, which was the largest mean of the three foods. It also had the maximum data point for splatter at 2.5 feet.

I would highly recommend using spaghetti in a food fight. The most important reason is that it is the perfect mixture of solid and less solid substances, so you can easily grab hold of a handful but still create a large mess. Another reason to use spaghetti during a food fight is that the sauce will probably stain your opponent’s clothes, thus leaving you victorious whether you technically win or not.