Eat Japanese instant noodles daily and you can live for a very long time! … but watch out for the sodium and the transfat in the instant ramen … very different from fresh ramen …

The news last Friday [January 5, 2007] of the death of the ramen noodle guy surprised those of us who had never suspected that there was such an individual. It was easy to assume that instant noodle soup was a team invention, one of those depersonalized corporate miracles, like the Honda Civic, the Sony Walkman and Hello Kitty, that sprang from that ingenious consumer-product collective known as postwar Japan.

But no. Momofuku Ando, who died in Ikeda, near Osaka, at 96, was looking for cheap, decent food for the working class when he invented ramen noodles all by himself in 1958. His product — fried, dried and sold in little plastic-wrapped bricks or foam cups — turned the company he founded, Nissin Foods, into a global giant. According to the company’s Web site, instant ramen satisfies more than 100 million people a day. Aggregate servings of the company’s signature brand, Cup Noodles, reached 25 billion worldwide in 2006.

“Mr. Noodle,” The New York Times, January 9, 2007

More

• Momofuku Ando – Wikipedia
• Instant Ramen’s Home Page – from the Japan Convenience Foods Industry Association
• Barbeque Cheeseburger Ramen – from The Official Ramen Homepage
• The Instant Ramen King, R.I.P. – from Telstar Logistics