Instant noodles are super popular
BBC World Service
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More than 100 billion servings of instant noodles were eaten last year. Who knows somebody that loves them?
The Eternal Life of the Instant Noodle
By Celia Hatton
In the birthplace of instant noodles, Japan, they’ve been voted - repeatedly - Japan’s most successful invention, ahead of high-speed trains, laptops and karaoke.
Enter our unlikely hero - a failed businessman named Momofuku Ando. Ando, as he’s affectionately known, had earned and lost fortunes, first in his native Taiwan and then in Japan. He made millions in industrial parts during the war, then lost it. At one point, he went to prison for fraud. He then headed a bank, which collapsed. But Ando was persistent. He wanted to rebuild his reputation and his fortune. A decade after the war had ended, contacts in Japan’s ministry of agriculture told him they were eager to figure out how to push Japanese people to eat more American wheat flour - the key component of US aid at the time.
That’s when, so the story goes, Ando remembered something he’d seen at the end of the war - queues of exhausted people waiting patiently in long lines for bowls of steaming ramen noodle soup. What was needed, Ando thought, was a modern, speedy version of that working-class comfort food. A food that, conveniently, used lots of American wheat flour.
