The Age of Cup Noodles
In 1971, Ando and his business Nissin advanced it. He was inspired to create the beloved Cup Noodles brand while on vacation in the United States.
This instant ramen in the “cup” style was also a huge hit, particularly outside of Japan. The cup served as a bowl for your ramen, so you didn’t even need one!
There are many flavors available today within the Cup Noodles brand, ranging from Thai tom yam kung to cheese curry.
Instant Ramen – How it All Started
Momofuku Ando, the Noodle God and a Japanese-Taiwanese businessman, created instant ramen for the first time in 1958. But lets rewind a bit.
Following World War II (after 1945), Japan’s population was experiencing food shortages. Rice shortages around this time didnt help either. As a result, the United States gave Japan a large donation of wheat flour. This wheat flour wasnt used for bread production though. It was used for ramen noodles sold in food carts!.
With this backdrop of ramen noodles, Ando was refining them in a “instant” form. After endless experimenting, he got it right in 1958. The worlds first instant ramen, a “chicken ramen”, was born. This “packet” style brand is still sold to this day.
His chicken ramen was a blockbuster hit. People loved it. Why not? All you required was a bowl to eat from and a pot of boiling water.
Having lived in Tokyo for his first ten years of his life before relocating to New England, Solt started working on his dissertation twelve years ago at the University of California, San Diego. The book, “Taking Ramen Seriously: Food, Labor, and Everyday Life in Modern Japan,” explored how Japan’s now-famous noodle soup is encapsulated national identity, labor practices, foreign trade, and food production. In the International Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies, he published a piece titled “Shifting Perceptions of Instant Ramen in Japan during the High-Growth Era, 1958-1973,” among other scholarly works on noodles. However, his doctoral dissertation became a book titled “The Untold History of Ramen: How Political Crisis in Japan Spawned a Global Food Craze,” which was released in February and is his most approachable work on the subject.
Solt commented, “Now that’s a great story!” as he ate the last of his ramen. “But, actually, I don’t want to keep doing food. After curry, I don’t know what else there is. There’s a limit to how much you can take yourself seriously and do things like this, Soba. ”.
In the front row, Solt, an assistant history professor at New York University, had been bent over his notes. At thirty-five, he has closely cropped hair and exudes a slightly Snoopy vibe. He stood up and surveyed the space; many people were silently slurping tiny bowls of ramen from Jin Ramen, a restaurant in Harlem. “First off, I don’t know how to cook ramen or where to get the best ramen,” Solt declared in his opening statement. “I’m approaching this from a historical perspective. ”.
After that, Solt was in a daze as they traveled along Third Avenue to the nearby Naruto Ramen. He exclaimed, “So many people showed up!” illustrating how isolating ten years of ramen research can be. He went into detail about how much Americans loved the dish as he looked over the menu at the packed bar while woks sizzled and smoked behind the counter. In the 1980s, when Japan was a significant economic rival of the United States, sushi came to be seen as the national dish of Japan. S. ,” he said. “The reason for the recent embrace of Japanese popular culture is that Japan is no longer a threat to the global economy.” That got transposed to China. It used to be Japan’s burden. ”.
His discussion covered the history of ramen, starting with its arrival as a uniquely Chinese soup in Japan in the nineteenth century, moving on to the American occupation following the war, the rise of instant ramen in Japan in the 1970s, the national craze that spawned ramen celebrities, ramen museums, and ramen video games in the 1980s and 1990s, and, lastly, America’s current embrace of ramen and Japanese culture as demonstrated by the cultlike craze surrounding the sixteen-dollar bowls of ramen served by celebrity chef David Chang.
