Saturday, June 04, 2005
From Earth to the Sun
Momofuku Ando, at age 96, will step down from his post as Chairman of Nissin Food Products at the end of this month. This is the Japanese company he founded after inventing instant ramen in 1958. The idea came to him one day when he saw a long line of people standing outside a noodle restaurant in a small town and thought, wouldn't it be great to have noodles that could be prepared in minutes, rather than having to wait in line?
For about a year, he got up at 5 a.m. each day and started going around to restaurants for noodle research. Then he'd return home and spend the rest of the day trying to make noodles, often working until 1 or 2 a.m. After many failures, he finally got it right with Japan's first instant noodles which he named "Chikin" ramen. When he noticed that Americans would often put the noodles into a paper cup and use a fork to eat them, he introduced in 1971 his next instant success called Cup Noodles (or "Cup Noodle" in Asian countries; maybe they give you less over there.)
Today some 600 new varieties hit Japanese store shelves each year, and manufacturers are constantly searching for attention-catching flavors. The average Japanese slurps a staggering 45 servings per year. Worldwide, about 50 billion packets are sold annually. If stretched end to end, the noodle strings would run 1.5 billion miles, or 9 times from Earth to the Sun and back. And smell about 200 times stronger than Tacoma.
On behalf of all current and former college students, I would like to wish Mr Ando a happy retirement, and thank him for saving many of us from days of certain starvation. He didn't just invent instant ramen, but gave us an entirely new recipe for surviving on 50 cents a day.
New York Times Square. Noodles over beer, anyone?
- posted by Woofwoof @ 7:32 AM
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Heh - I was *completely* thinking college when you started this - I remember the calculation well - $2, ramen for a week. $7, beer for tonight. $1 money I could blow on anything.
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