![]() ![]() Papua New Guineans have incorporated the noodles into rituals as cardinal as weaning babies and honoring the dead, she says. Mexicans can buy Maruchan noodle soup cups flecked with shrimp, lime and habanero, among other flavors. In Thailand, instant ramen is seasoned with lemongrass and cilantro. "They're capable of being transformed to everyone's cultural taste." "They're cheap and tasty and tweakable," Gewertz tells The Salt. These supercheap, superpalatable noodles, they write, help the low-wage workers in rich and poor countries alike hang on when the going gets tough. ![]() And it's here that they make one of their most intriguing arguments: Instant noodles do good by alleviating the hunger of millions of people around the world. ![]() Indeed, it's the multinational noodle companies' conquest of countries like Papua New Guinea, Nigeria, Brazil and Mexico that really interests the anthropologists: Frederick Errington of Trinity College, Tatsuro Fujikura of Kyoto University and Deborah Gewertz of Amherst College. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Our consumption is dwarfed by that of China and India - and even Vietnam.Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Noodle Narratives Subtitle The Global Rise of an Industrial Food Into the Twenty-First Century Author Frederick Errington, Deborah Gewertz, et al And while our foodie culture currently has a fling with ramen (think ramen bars and the ramen burger), we're only the world's sixth-biggest market for the noodles, according to the World Instant Noodles Association. That's an astonishing quantity, especially to American consumers, who don't tend to think of the stiff, wavy blocks of noodles as an important staple (though they are for some college students, inmates and low-income Americans). Take a moment to digest that figure: It's about 14 servings for every single person on Earth, at a cost of just a few cents apiece. And it has finally been outed by three anthropologists in a fascinating new book The Noodle Narratives, which analyzes the precipitous rise - or "brilliant career," as the authors say - of instant ramen, from its birth in postwar Japan to its sales of just over 100 billion servings worldwide in 2012. A child eats instant noodles on a train at the Harbin Railway Station in northeast China.Īsk about the foods that have conquered the world and you're likely to hear about Coca-Cola and McDonald's Big Macs.īut the most successful industrial food ever produced flies far under the radar. ![]()
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