A Sad Day for Grad Students

Momufuku Ando, the inventor of instant ramen, has died in Japan at the age of 96. I could not possibly estimate the number of servings of instant ramen that I ingested in my college days. Of course, backpackers as well are forever in his debt.

Ando is a classic example of the entrepreneur who succeeds with a seemingly basic, mundane idea, which was only obvious after he came up with it. The Economist has an excellent obituary, at
http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8548461

The cult was global. In 2005, 86 billion servings of instant noodles were eaten around the world. And all this began with a vision, as such things do. One cold night in 1957, walking home from his salt-making factory in Osaka, in Japan, Mr Ando saw white clouds of steam in the street, and a crowd of people gathering. They were waiting for noodles to be cooked to order in vats of boiling water, and were prepared to wait a long time. Why not make it easier? thought Mr Ando. And why not try to do it himself?

His life until then had been a bit of a mess. He had sold dress fabrics, following in the footsteps of the grandparents who had brought him up. He had sold engine-parts, prefabricated houses, magic-lantern projectors, socks. He had presided over a credit association, which had gone bust, and tried to launch a scholarship scheme for poor students, which had landed him in jail for tax evasion. But now the “steadily rising” clouds (or possibly, as in the cartoon on the homepage of his Instant Noodle Museum in Osaka, one fluffy white cloud with a kettle dangling from it) had shown him the Way.

The road was long. It took a year, working night and day in a shed in his back garden, to find the secret of bringing noodles back to life. Mr Ando cooked quantities, but had trouble getting the moisture out and keeping any flavouring in. He sprayed them with chicken soup from a watering can, and festooned the shed with them. The secret, picked up from his wife as she cooked vegetable tempura, was to flash-fry the cooked noodles in palm oil. This made them “magic

”.

I

n 1958 instant noodles went on the market, yellowish wormy bricks in cellophane bags, and were laughed at by fresh-noodle makers all over Japan. They were just a high-tech craze, costing six times as much as the fresh stuff; they would never catch on. By the end of the first year Mr Ando had sold 13m bags and had attracted a dozen competitors. He never looked back. In 1971 came noodles in heat-proof polystyrene cups, so that the hungry did not even need to get their bowls out of the cupboard. The Japanese voted instant noodles their most important 20th-century invention, Sony Walkmans notwithstanding. Mr Ando's firm, Nissin, became a $3 billion global enterprise.

But it was never just a company, and instant-noodlemaking never just an industry. The three sayings of Mr Ando became a philosophy of life:
Peace will come when people have food.
Eating wisely will enhance beauty and health.
The creation of food will serve society.

Mr Ando practised what he preached. He ate Chikin Ramen, his original flavour of noodles, almost every day until he died. Though sceptics pointed out that they were loaded with fat, salt and monosodium glutamate, he looked bonny and spry. Seabeds across Asia were littered with plastic noodle cups; but that was not his

fault.

His TV advertising, meanwhile, showed what instant noodles were really all about. When the world turned to eating them, barriers fell, children laughed and people loved each other. All liberating revolutions sprang from humanity's desire to gulp down steaming Cup Noodles whenever there was a chance. In 2006 a Japanese astronaut, on board the space shuttle Discovery, supped Mr Ando's noodles from a handy vacuum pack. He appeared on the TV ads weightless and smiling, his enlightenment complete.