In Praise of Ramen Noodles. . . And the Man Who Created Them.

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It's the little things that matter. . .

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The 20th century introduced us to a multitude of inventions that transformed us culturally, socially and even politically. It's difficult to pinpoint the most fabulous creation that lifted us from the social mire in which we'd been immersed for centuries. Some say it was the computer. Others will point to the airplane. The slackers among us will say it was movies.

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All of these assumptions are wrong.

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Discounting superglue, nothing affected us more than three things: duct tape, velcro and ramen noodles. Here's why. The inventions that really impact our daily lives go unsung, mainly because they were so perfect, we never noticed their how cool they really were.

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Consider this. Duct tape is the musician's best friend--it splices multiple wires, it essentially holds the stage together, and without it, there would be a helluva lot more rock and roll suicides. With duct tape, you know nothing's going anywhere. I'll forego the implications of that.

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Velcro's a different matter. It's the ultimate easy answer to every conundrum. It solved every would-be home designer's problems regarding placement of flea market art. With Velcro, you could make everything instataneous, even the way your trouser cuffs hanged (Remember parachute pants?) You could fasten anything to Velcro, and feel relatively secure it would hold. For a while, it even seemed a likely replacement for shoestrings, though aesthetics doomed that idea.

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But nothing has had a more profound, if indirect, impact on our culture than ramen noodles. I shudder to even contemplate where our society would be technologically, medically, culturally or even politically, had Momofuku Ando not perfected the formula for ramen noodles in 1958. He died yesterday, 6 January, of heart failure at the age of 96.

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Ando said his inspiration for instant noodles came after seeing lines of refugees waiting for traditional ramen soup. He wanted to feed people cheaply and quickly. and after much trial and error, the finally perfected his flash frying method of cooking noodles, enabling them to be ready to serve by boiling for three minutes. The original version, chikin ramen, was not an instant hit, since it cost six times as much as traditional noodles. As production costs went down, however, ramen noodles soared in popularity. Today, an estimated 70 billion servings are sold annually worldwide.

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While that's a staggering figure, it's not surprising, considering that the packets sell for between 10-20 cents in the United States. And with the multidudinous varieties of flavor packets available for that little bag of dried noodles, it's astoundingly simple for a starving college student to convince his or her self that they are eating a varied diet. If you added crackers, and chopped-up wafer meat, they actually made for quite a satisfying meal, as I remember.

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There is little doubt in my mind that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates owe at least some of their success to Momofuku Ando and his invention of instant noodles. In fact, I'd hazard to guess that your accountant, your doctor, your lawyer, your congressman--in short, every professional on whom you depend-- would not be where they are now without ramen noodles at some point in their lives.

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So I salute you, Momofuku Ando, sir. You left this world a little wiser by feeding us when we had little money, and giving us the energy to explore our ideas, rather than wonder if we were going to starve. You will not be forgotten.