Investigating how and why a strand of uncooked spaghetti breaks after bending — well that’s a complicated undertaking, with a rich history. One man’s take appears in this writeup:
“The dynamics of linear spaghetti structures — how one thing just leads to another,” RWD Nickalls, 14 June, 2006. The author is at the Department of Anaesthesia, Nottingham University Hospitals, City Hospital Campus, Nottingham, UK.
The 2006 Ig Nobel Prize in physics centered on this very topic. The prize was awarded to Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris, for their insights into why, when you bend dry spaghetti, it often breaks into more than two pieces. [REFERENCE: “Fragmentation of Rods by Cascading Cracks: Why Spaghetti Does Not Break in Half,” Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch, Physical Review Letters, vol. 95, no. 9, August 26, 2005, pp. 95505-1 to 95505-1.]