Oh, dear g*d, not again. Yes. The Dope has had numerous discussions about how we are able to slurp spaghetti into our mouth. I’ll link to just one, the latest I think. But today I had the chance to add to the data. I had a plate of bucatini. It is a fairly thick strand with a difference - it has a hole through the center. I noticed that while slurping sometimes I could sense air being pulled through a strand that was not blocked by the sauce. So I tried a single strand by itself. It works best with a shorter strand so you can make sure the hole is clear. It will not slurp, it just sits there in your lips hissing. I was able to get some to move by keeping the lips loose and slurping air along with the strand with some effort.
Well, what I can say is that after decades of practice, I have finally gotten to the point in the art of rolling spaghetti on my fork where I can do so with only one or two strands dangling. And I have to say that eating long pastas as a blob rather than one strand at a time is a complete and absolute game changer.
It’s notoriously easy to drink using a straw, and rather hard to suck an unladen straw by itself into your mouth.
Which also suggests that bucatini, or at least your brand, has about the biggest hole that can be readily bridged by sauce to make most of the pasta suckable.
There used to be a toy/prank you could buy at joke shops comprising a squeezy ketchup bottle with a piece of red string threaded through the nozzle - when you squeeze the bottle, the string is squirted out and looks, for a moment, like a jet of ketchup.
Sucking up spaghetti is just the same - the higher pressure on one side causes it to be pushed through the hole into the lower pressure zone on the other side - when the bottle is released and springs back to its original form, the pressure inside is lowered and the string is pushed back inside by the higher ambient pressure.
If you tried to do it with a piece of thin tube instead of the string, it would only work if there was sufficient resistance to airflow inside the tube, so that the tube-plus-air can effectively be pushed as one.
Oh, I would love a pterodactyl! Please, make one! Two would be even better!
I suppose we will end up proving that you cannot suck spaghetti in a vacuum. In space no one can hear you slurp. Just as well: freeze drying spaghetti ruins their taste.
