Usually the Google Doodle celebrates an accomplishment in science or literature, but today’s is an accomplishment in food. If you go to the Google page (click on screenshot below), you’ll see an animation of someone enjoying a steaming bowl of noodles:
and there’s another, too! I think it’s random which one you get:
What is this? If you’ve been an impoverished college student, forced to consume mass quantities of cheap ramen noodles (as I did), you may recognize this as a commemoration of Momfuko Ando, born in this day in 1910 (died 2007)—the inventor of instant ramen noodles and the famous Cup o’ Noodles.
Wikipedia tells the tale:
With Japan still suffering from a shortage of food in the post-war era, the Ministry of Health tried to encourage people to eat bread made from wheat flour that was supplied by the United States. Ando wondered why bread was recommended instead of noodles, which were more familiar to the Japanese. The Ministry’s response was that noodle companies were too small and unstable to satisfy supply needs, so Ando decided to develop the production of noodles by himself. The experience convinced him that “Peace will come to the world when the people have enough noodles to eat.” [JAC: Hasn’t worked.]
On August 25, 1958, at the age of 48, and after months of trial and error experimentation to perfect his flash-frying method, Ando marketed the first package of precooked instant noodles. The original chicken flavor is called Chikin Ramen (チキンラーメン?). It was originally considered a luxury item with a price of ¥35, around six times that of traditional udon and soba noodles at the time. Ando began the sales of his most famous product, Cup Noodle (カップヌードルKappu Nūdoru?), on September 18, 1971 with the masterstroke of providing a waterproof polystyrene container. As prices dropped, instant ramen soon became a booming business. Worldwide demand reached 98 billion servings in 2007. As of 2007, Chikin Ramen is still sold in Japan and now retails for around ¥60 [50 cents U.S.], or approximately one third the price of the cheapest bowl of noodles in a Japanese restaurant.
The Independent adds this, accounting for the second Doodle above:
In 1957 Ando discovered that by flash-frying ramen noodles in tempura oil, tiny holes would appear in the noodles, causing them to cook almost instantly once they are covered with hot water.
Ando continued to develop his discovery and in 1971 created Cup Noodles, before eventually inventing “Space Ram” – instant noodles to be eaten in space – when in his nineties.
I’m surprised that Google would celebrate the inventor of instant ramen, but then I remembered the kind of person who gets a job at Google!
The US Google celbrates the creatot of the instant noodle, Google UK celebrates Mercator’s 503rd birthday!
Does this say anything about science in the two countries?!
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/gerardus-mercators-503rd-birthday-google-celebrates-cartographer-who-created-the-atlas-10086553.html
Mercator here in Canada too.
I am an American boomer who has never eaten Ramen. I have eaten plenty of noodles and I may have eaten Cup of Noodles once. But I have used maps. I feel short-changed.
At google.ca (Canada) we get a doodle of Geradus Mercator, the mapmaker.
I didn’t see Dominic’s post. Does this mean Google considers Canada to be more British than North American?
Have you changed your anthem yet to be less sexist?! 😉 We have too much god in ours…
Yesterday, which you guys are still experiencing, NZ had noodles on Google too. I reckon we’re more British than Canada.
Hello future!
No noodles for Europe though. We get cartography, maths and philosophy in the form of Gerardus Mercator’ 503rd birthday.
Yup, Mercator for both videos.
BTW, Momofuku means Lucky Peach ( in Korean, or maybe Japanese) and is the nsme of David Chang’s great reatsurants in Toronto and NYC. I GUESS ramen dude’s first name is Lucky Peach.
There’s also a Lucky Peach journal of food and writing – you can subscribe on their website, or buy individual issues. I have the issue on Street Food and it’s excellent.
I’ve heard of the magazine and think it’s related to David Chang. Really interesting food he cooks!! His pork buns and, surprisingly perhaps, Brussels Sprouts, are to die for. He also did several cameo appearances on the show Treme.
“Peace will come to the world when the people have enough noodles to eat.” [JAC: Hasn’t worked.]
We still don’t have enough noodles! Or maybe he was referring to Pastafarians. Yep, that’s probably it. Either way, more noodliness can’t hurt.
Ra’men
We need to make sure everyone is touched by his noodley appendage! 🍜
/@
Did not mean to shout guess…
You can check the different Google Doodles for different days and locations here: http://www.google.com/doodles/
So he invented the ramen noodle, big whoop.
He’d be nothing without the inventor of the flavour packet.
Mr. Ando was evidently not just noodling
around. He put some real thought into his
invention.
Shame I’ve already got lunch and dinner planned and no ramen in the house, else I’d nuke some in his honor.
I will be making kasha varnishkes with dinner tonight, though, and that includes both (bowtie) noodles and buckwheat (soba). I imagine it’s probably a Japanese native’s favorite Yiddish dish. Does that count?
b&
Don’t forget to slurp, no need to be rude.
Noodles were the cause of a serious dilemma for me, once upon a time. My wife and I were vacationing in Japan, visiting a friend who lived there (somewhere in the vicinity of Shinjuku). My friend took us, of course, to a noodle shop, considered to be one of the best.
The place smelled wonderful. We ordered. I patiently waited, working hard not to start drooling. An enormous, beautiful bowl of noodles was placed before me. Spicy, because I like spicy. Etiquette having been previously explained, we all began slurping away. It was delicious!
As time went on, working my way through this wonderful bowl of noodles, I became flushed. Little beads of sweat began popping out here and there. My face was steadily accumulating juice from the noodle slurping. And then, my nose began to run.
Wait. What?!? There’s no napkins?! WTF?!
I learned, over the next couple of weeks, that sanitary paper products can be hard to come by in public places in Japan. Napkins at restaurants? Better bring your own just to be safe. Toilet paper? Ditto. Don’t count on it.
The toilet thing cracked me up. You had two extremes. Either a 5 star toilet that will warm, clean and perfume your nethers, and needs an instruction manual to operate, or a hole in the floor in a bare room with no toilet paper.
You tuck into the noodles & I will tuck into a projection or two!
I once rationed myself to an $8.70 per week food budget for a month or two. Instant noodles figured prominently in that diet, but an X brand not the upscale Ramen brand. Ridiculously cheap, 8 or 9 packages for $1.
That budget was also supplemented by free food, that was slated for disposal, from the grocery store I worked nights at. Bricks of moldy cheese, damaged packages, out of date stuff that vendors did not reclaim, deli stuff that was left over at closing. There is nothing quite like crappy supermarket egg rolls that have been sitting under a heat lamp for 12 hours, cooled down and then reheated.
Ramen noodles, pop tarts, and canned beans. The caloric density of those foods allow single males to minimize disposable income food purchases…and a bag of skittles for vitamin C. 🙂
I have been impoverished and have never understood why someone would buy prepared foods when cooking from ingredients is even cheaper.
There’s no way Ramen can compete in nutrition to rice, lentils and beans, bought dry and in moderate quantity.
Absolutely! When I’ve been on my last pennies, I always spend them on rice, beans, and bananas (cheap in tropical countries).
A Brazilian friend tells me that mangoes are plentiful and essentially free in her homeland. I’ve yet to experience this wondrous miracle for myself, so I scarcely dare believe it.
Though I did experience the wondrous miracle of free blackberries while in grad school, which gives me hope for the free mangoes.
I can believe it. In my experience, limited really to just one tree, but ohhh . . . what a tree, mango trees are very prolific.
On a property an uncle of mine once owned there was a mature mango tree that was easily 30′ (10 meters) tall. It produced a truly awesome amount of fruit every year. To top it off, its mangos were the best I’ve ever had, before or since. Wonderful texture and color, wonderful fragrance and a smooth clean taste of vanilla and mild citrus. I have searched in vain for similar mangos, but have not found any that come close.
Often one has the time constraint – perhaps a subjective one – as well, alas.
That said, I’d put the beans IN the ramen …
I’m not sure why the Wikipedia article spells the English version as “chikin.” In Japanese, チキン = chicken.
They are merely transliterating from the katakana (a syllabary used for foreign words) which reads chi-ki-n.