In which Rebecca serves up a lunch of letters and gets distracted with some maths.
Dear Reader,
I was thrilled by the promise of a recent bookshelf discovery that it would provide ‘…a delightful introduction to the script of China and Japan’ in a ‘happy-go-lucky, fun-filled manner.’ The writers of Noodle Words – an introduction to Chinese and Japanese characters, D M Murray and T W Wong, tell us that one day the philosopher and teacher Confucius had let slip from his chopsticks a few noodles, and the shape they formed after falling had suggested to him the flowing lines of a river. In this way, according to Murray and Wong, was created the first of the great mass of Chinese characters.
This story of Confucius’ noodles should perhaps – indeed, like any cuisine – be taken with a pinch of salt, although of course there is plenty of literary potential to be found in the kitchen.
Although I was brought up not to play with my food, there is always fun to be had by making arrangements of it at the dinner table. There is pleasure to be had positioning peas on a plate, right?
And, back to those noodles: eating soup is great fun when you can play with those! Slurping, splashing and stirring are all part of the experience, but whose bright idea was it to add spelling to the list of activities to engage with at the bottom of the bowl?
One common American brand of condensed-style alphabet soup is Campbell’s, which, like its competitors, is marketed towards parents for its educational value.
A similar product, Alphabetti Spaghetti, was sold by the H J Heinz Company for 60 years before being discontinued in 1990. Like Campbell’s alphabet soup, it contains alphabet pasta canned in tomato sauce. It was later reintroduced by Heinz in 2005.
Given the considerable educational potential of a plateful of assorted letters, I wonder what impact the 15-year interregnum had on the literacy of tinned pasta consumers at the time?
And what if a food product came in the shape of just one letter rather than the whole alphabet? Such things do exist, of course, in the form of Campbell’s SpaghettiOs and Heinz Spaghetti Hoops, but the lexical potential of a single vowel is limited. I can understand that a bowl of Cheerios might be an intellectually straightforward breakfast – heck, I know that I’m monosyllabic first thing in the morning – but surely adding in some Cheeripees, Cheeriecues and Cheeriars would make for a more exciting conversation?
So, come lunchtime, I’m up for the challenge of a more complex construction. Because…
Last week I opened a tin of Alphabetti to see whether it contained enough variety for me to spell anything interesting.
Some of the letters I was arranging didn’t seem quite right. The S is disappointing, because although it’s perfectly shaped when it’s the wrong way up…
…when it’s facing the right way it just looks uncomfortable. These guys clearly need a massage to make them stand a little better.
As for the I, it’s hopeless. With no counterstruts top and bottom the poor thing is teetering on its edge the whole time. Perhaps if I’d served him on a grippy slice of crisp toast my friend the I-noodle wouldn’t have slid sideways into his slippery sauce. Sorry, little guy.
Heck, I’m even talking to my food now.
Needing a more robust set of props to play with, yesterday I set about sorting the contents of a 500g bag of structurally-stable dried alphabet pasta into alphabetical order. The first five minutes were thrilling – is that an A or a V? – and within a few moments I’d found enough Qs to spell two and a half quinquennia.
Not far into the mechanics of maths-meets-mealmaking I found myself making the sensible decision to sort only the first 100 pieces of pasta out of the packet, and once that much briefer task was complete I set about taking a look at the distribution of the noodle letters across the alphabet. By happy coincidence I remembered that Scrabble™️ has 100 tiles, so of course making a comparison between groceries and game pieces was inevitable.
Now, I am certain that a great deal of letter frequency analysis had gone on behind the scenes before Scrabble™️ reached the market in the mid-20th century, but I feel that the folks in charge of the M&S pasta extrusion line weren’t quite so diligent. Reader, I soon found this dubious ‘literacy’ project had become an investigation into questionable numeracy instead.
Comparing the vowel distribution between my two sets of letters – Scrabble™️ and pasta – I was able to ascertain that the traditional word game has nearly twice as many As, half the number of Es, three times the Is, twice the Os and 33% more Us, and that many high-scoring letters in Scrabble™️ are disproportionately over-represented in the noodle sample.
There were 9 Hs and 11 Vs in my pile of pasta, compared with just two of each in Scrabble™️. The game scores 8 points from its single X, but my alternative specimen set scores me a whopping 48 points for half a dozen of them! Five Qs is a ridiculous tally in a sample size of only 100 units, and worth a full 40 points higher than the more quautious cautious score of 10 from the single Q present among the Scrabble™️ tiles.
Wanna see the total for each sample according to the Scrabble™️ scoring system?
Here’s my working out:
That set of 100 letters from my packet of M&S pasta wins by a huge margin, scoring 318 points against a measly Scrabble™️ score of just 184! Go, noodles!
Yet all this maths hardly counts as playing with our food. Let’s not forget that pasta shapes can be a source of leisure as well as learning.
In junior school art class we painted mountains of macaroni to string onto elastic to wear as jewellery, and after a self-portrait painting session we glued gaudy gold-sprayed pasta shells onto cardboard picture frames to display a rather nicer exhibition of ourselves than the sauce-spattered aftermath of school-lunch Alphabetti all over our faces.
And if Scrabble™️ feels too much like hard work, what about playing a simpler game on your plate; one beloved by all ages across the world? We call it noughts and crosses over here but in the States it’s Tic Tac Toe. Hey, Heinz, with your hoops-only tins, you’re missing a trick! No crosses, and just the noughts?
Well, that’s more like Tic Tac NO…….
Perhaps we’d better just eat our noodles. 🍝
With love,
Rebecca
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