Unhappy tidings from the Philadelphia suburbs: the inventor of SpaghettiOs has passed away. Like their mother and uncle before them, my niece and nephew consume SpaghettiOs with a zeal that borders on the competitive, and while both of them are too young to imagine that someone invented their favorite lunch, this news saddens us grown-ups, as I’m sure it will give pause to any parent or caregiver who’s ever uttered those timeless words, “No! Not on the carpet!”
But you know, like a belly full of those diminutive sliced franks, something in the Philadelphia Inquirer obituary just doesn’t sit right. Behold, the official origin story of SpaghettiOs:
One of Mr. Eberling’s early challenges for Campbell’s was creating a spaghetti-and-meatballs product that would fit neatly in a can. He had a breakthrough, his son said, while cleaning up from dinner one night. He noticed a strand of spaghetti twirled in the sink and took the concept for SpaghettiOs to his supervisor, Ralph Miller. The new product, promoted by the popular “Uh-oh SpaghettiOs” jingle, became a big success.
That fable may have fooled the credulous media, but several years of graduate school taught me that there’s no reason to accept the homely simplicity of truth when one can weave an ingenious tapestry of fantasy from the wispy threads of whimsy and supposition.
The inventor of SpaghettiOs was born—aha!—in the German city of Aachen. A masterpiece of medieval architecture stands at the center of Aachen: Charlemagne’s octagonal chapel. As UNESCO reminds us, “[a]n octagon can be made by drawing two intersecting squares within a circle. The circle represents God’s eternity while the square represents the secular world.” Although “circularity” applies to any individual SpaghettiO, it also may signify the lesser known RavioliOs, a product that need not be circular in order to fit neatly in a can. Thus, the post-formalist rejection of square ravioli in favor of the circular demonstrates a deliberately supra-utilitarian intention to transcend the secular and destabilize the traditional reading of canned pasta. We can at last begin to de-problematize the systems of knowledge coordinated to produce SpaghettiOs by calling attention to the original name of the company that evoked the circular plan of the chapel of the rex Francorum by representing eternity in pasta: Franco-American.
I’ve much more to say on this subject, and in the coming months I’ll develop and defend my ironclad thesis in a lengthy paper, which I shall deliver at several hundred academic conferences. My peers, I predict, will be stunned into silence. Who will blame them if they’re forced to flee the room?
Utterly Eurocentric supposition. Ibn Battuta brought SpaghettiOs from China (Tocharian spaega tyo=divine meal) to Aachen; recipe was stolen from his baggage by innkeeper Ludolf Gutenberg, and kept in family for many centuries–e.g., SpaghettiO recipe visible in palimpsest of Gutenberg Bible at Morgan Library. All this detailed in The Private Life of Ibn Battuta, MS found in Timbuktu geniza in 1996. You must keep up with the literature on the subject!
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Jeff,
People will only be forced to flee the room if you perform a cooking demonstration while delivering your paper and they catch a whiff of the sauce.
I have no idea why I loved Spaghettios as a kid, but now as an adult I cannot stand the smell. There is something unnaturally cloying about that tomato sauce mixture which bears too close a resemblance to vomit for me.
I must say that your blog has a delightful unpredictability about it.
Linda
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Much like Daniel Jackson before you, you will doubtlessly be vindicated after your inevitable ostrazication.
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Withywindle, Erich von Daniken conclusively demonstrated in Cuisine of the Gods? that SpaghettiOs were simply beyond human technology at that time. The most plausible explanation is that they were an early form of sustenance for human slaves (the circles made them easy to store on slender sticks for travel) assigned by aliens to carve the Easter Island statues. If you look closely at Chef Boyardee’s mustache, you can see one of the Easter Island faces peering out from the left side of his mouth. Everybody knows this! The lack of scholarly rigor at this site is appalling.
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Thank god we still have Chef Boyardee. We do, right? I mean, on top of this news, I couldn’t stand the thought of losing the creater of Beef-a-roni, too.
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Bad news, RP: Ettore Boiardi, the real Chef Boyardee, has been dead for 22 years. Fortunately, every can of pasta perpetuates his sodium-infused legacy.
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