The Noodle Narratives
The Global Rise of an Industrial Food into the Twenty-First Century
By Frederick Errington, Tatsuro Fujikura, Deborah Gewertz
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27634-5
Contents
List of Illustrations and Table, vii,
Acknowledgments, ix,
Introduction: Instant Noodles as Quotidian and Ubiquitous, 1,
1. The Taste of Something Good, 11,
2. Japanese Instant Noodles in the Market and on the Mind, 33,
3. What Instant Noodles Reflect and Affect in America, 64,
4. Instant Noodles for the Bottom of the Pyramid in Papua New Guinea, 83,
5. Making (and Unmaking?) a Big Food World, 102,
Conclusion: Big Food for a Huge Population?, 126,
Notes, 145,
References, 171,
Index, 193,
CHAPTER 1
The Taste of Something Good
The circumstances of Ando's invention of instant noodles have circulated widely, with standardized versions of the story appearing in the instant noodle museums as well as in numerous publications, including Ando's autobiography, The Story of the Invention of Instant Ramen. Indeed, as featured in our conversations with instant noodle manufacturers, these tales have become a charter myth—a foundational noodle narrative—for a whole industry. Ando, it is said, envisioned a streamlined variant of a food already well known to his postwar countrymen from "real" ramen shops. However, unlike these "real" noodles, which required considerable time and attention to prepare, his instant noodles could provide his hard-pressed and often hungry compatriots with a quick, filling, and relatively inexpensive meal. But success did not come easily, and Ando experimented tirelessly in his backyard shack to make his product commercially viable, suitable for large-scale industrial production. As he states in his autobiography: "I set myself five objectives. First, the noodles should be tasty and palatable. Second, they should keep for a long period of time and be easy to store in the kitchen. Third, they should be easy to prepare. Fourth, the product should be inexpensive. Fifth, the noodles should be safe and sanitary since they were for human consumption." Here we describe how Ando was successful at meeting these objectives. As we shall see, instant noodles are well suited to capitalist provisioning not only because they are inexpensive to produce on an industrial scale but also because their physical properties appeal to a great many hard-wired human gustatory and olfactory pleasures. In this sense, Ando made us all collaborators in the success of his product.
INSTANT NOODLES ON THE PRODUCTION LINE
Like most Japanese noodles, Ando's were made from wheat, an ingredient both familiar and inexpensive, given American food aid at the time. His primary technical challenge was to develop a method of precooking noodles so that they retained their form and were shelf stable, yet readily reconstituted and tasty. The eventual solution was to apply the "principle of tempura": to pass the noodles, already steamed and sprinkled with chicken broth, through a bath of hot oil. In this way, the residual moisture would bubble out, leaving the noodles dehydrated and porous, relatively inert and easily (instantly) rehydrated when immersed in hot water.
At least in its basic form, the technology of instant noodle production has remained relatively the same. And the variations designed to appeal to particular markets—the preferred color, firmness, seasoning, and means of delivering flavor (whether during processing, as with Ando's original method, or, more commonly today, from a flavor sachet)—can be readily incorporated into standard production setups. Instant noodle factories of at least adequate sophistication can be established throughout the developing world in places like PNG (though perhaps with the outsourcing of the flavor sachets).
The wheat flour normally used is made from high-protein (10 to 12 percent) hard wheat to produce a relatively firm noodle. If the noodles are to be enriched (restoring the B vitamins lost during the milling of the wheat) or fortified (with additional nutrients, such as vitamin A, calcium, or iron), appropriate ingredients are included in the flour. The flour is thoroughly mixed with water containing salt (for white coloring, taste, and preservative qualities) and a gum (for texture) to make a dough. This dough is then dropped onto a conveyor belt and caught up in an uninterrupted process. First, it passes through a series of closely paired rollers to form a thin, continuous sheet. (In the two PNG factories Deborah and Fred visited, the rollers and therefore the sheets were about a meter wide.) This procedure manipulates the dough both to facilitate the development of the wheat's gluten (for chewiness) and to bring it to a final noodle thickness of about one millimeter. Next, the sheet passes through a pair of sharply grooved rollers that slice it into noodle-width strands, which are given a slight wiggle to create a wave that allows quicker and more even circulation of hot water when the noodles are rehydrated prior to consumption. The wavy strands are channeled into lines—each the width of a package of noodles—and conveyed through a steamer to be briefly cooked: this gelatinizes the starch, improving texture, and denatures the proteins, fixing the wave in place. Emerging from the steamer still soft, the noodles can now be cut to their final package length. At this point, the blocks (cakes or pillows) of wavy noodles are ready for the final frying and drying. Still following the principle of tempura, the blocks pass for several minutes through a bath of hot (usually palm) oil. Then they are drained of much of this oil and allowed to cool before moving in regimented rows to a mechanical packager. There, often joined by flavor sachets, they are wrapped in an airtight film. Fried, dried, and sealed, they are now shelf stable.
Ando anticipated that instant noodles would become ubiquitous. As he writes in his autobiography, "I said to myself: 'Food knows no national boundaries.' I suppose that even then I already had a gut feeling that instant ramen would one day become a global food." The fact that Ando was right owes much to the physical properties of instant noodles that he perfected through his experiments—that they would be convenient, cheap, shelf stable, and industrially produced. It also owes much to his insistence that his noodles strike a widely appreciated and basic culinary chord that can be readily elaborated in culturally specific ways.
Yet how to do this? Taste is complex. Scientists writing about gustation, or taste sensations emanating from the tongue to the brain, have long agreed that four tastes—sweet, sour, salty, and bitter—are primary or basic: these are hardwired, in that our responses to them are inborn. In fact, the psychologist Jacob Steiner has demonstrated that, with near universality, newborns exhibit the same facial expressions when presented with each of these four tastes. Some scientists have also come to accept umami (which is a perception of savory) as a fifth primary taste.
Not all substances, though, can be readily classified according to these four or five categories. Indeed, because the receptor cells for different tastes work in complex combinations, what humans experience may be less a set of discrete essences than a gradient of sensations. The sometimes ambiguous line between (for example) salty, sweet, or...
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