When it came to Italian food, Americans used to play it pretty straight. For most people, pasta meant spaghetti. Period. Occasionally an adventurous soul would add a little supermarket Parmesan--the kind with so many freshness-extending preservatives it had less a shelf life than a half-life--but that was it.
Things started to change in the 1960s with the introduction of SpaghettiOs, a circular pasta product advertised with the singsongy jingle "Uh-oh: SpaghettiOs!" (This was a slight departure from the focus group's reported reaction, which was said to be "Pardon-me-but-it-appears-that-by- some-hideous-mistake-you've-served-me: SpaghettiOs!") SpaghettiOs soon gave way to RavioliOs, which gave way in turn to a wide range of spaghettiesque foods including dinosaur pasta, shark-shaped pasta, Where's Waldo? pasta, and alphabet pasta (can you spell unappetizing?).
But if the United States is being spirited with its spaghetti, frolicsome with its fettuccine, Canada is even more so. Last February, Okanagan University College in Kelowna, British Columbia, held its eleventh annual Spaghetti Bridge Building Contest. The tournament, sponsored by the university and several local engineering and technology associations, is intended to help contestants learn some of the basic principles of architecture and engineering. People are invited to design and build model bridges made entirely of pasta and bring them to the campus where they--the bridges--are judged on strength and overall economy of design.
For a country that's already given the world Kim Campbell, Mike Meyers, and towns with names like Central Patricia, Ear Falls, Flin Flon, Margie, Minnipuka, Mushaboom, Rat Rapids, Wabigoon, and Wawa, a spaghetti bridge contest would seem to be beyond the comedic call of duty. Yet since 1984 Okanagan University College has been rounding up the best spaghetti engineers in the ten provinces and putting them through their pasta paces. This year, in pursuit of drama, local color, and a peek at what might be the world's only al dente architecture, I decided to bundle up and then trundle up to Canada.
Kelowna is located in a mountainous stretch of British Columbia that resembles the northwestern United States except for two tiny differences: the population distribution is about one person per cubic time zone, and of course, the people who live there say "eh?" a lot (as in "Where is everybody, eh?"). The weekend of the contest, however, the Kelowna head count rises dramatically.
