Stop Press — Momofuku Ando is dead

Who was Momofuku Ando (above)?

Only the inventor of instant ramen.

His obituary, as it appeared in yesterday's New York Times, follows.

Momofuku Ando, 96, Dies; Invented Instant Ramen

Momofuku Ando, who — to the delight of dormitory students and other kitchen-resistant customers worldwide — invented those small packets of preflavored dried noodles that require just a three-minute boil, died Friday at a hospital in Osaka, Japan. Mr. Ando, the founder of the Nissin Food Products Company, was 96.

The cause was heart failure, said Larry Lampel, the company's senior resources manager at its American headquarters in Gardena, Calif.

Starting with the chicken-broth noodles in cellophane bags that Mr. Ando first concocted in a shack behind his house in Ikeda, Japan, 49 years ago, Nissin now produces 16 flavors of what it calls Top Ramen and Cup Noodles. Besides six varieties of chicken, they include beef, shrimp, vegetable and spicy chili.

The company sold 46.3 billion packs and cups around the world last year, earning $131 million in profits.

In 1958, Mr. Ando — virtually penniless after a credit association he served as chairman went bankrupt — began experimenting with ways to prepare flavored noodles by simply adding hot water.

The idea stemmed from an experience a decade earlier, when Japan was still ravaged by postwar poverty. In "The Story of the Invention of Instant Ramen,"€ an autobiography published in 2002, Mr. Ando told of walking through the rubble-strewn streets of Osaka.

"I happened to pass this area and saw a line 20, 30 meters long in front of a dimly lit stall from which clouds of steam were steadily rising,"€ he wrote. "People dressed in shabby clothes shivered in the cold while waiting for their turn. The person who was with me said they were lined up for a bowl of ramen."€

"I realized that people were willing to wait patiently just for a bowl of ramen,"€ he said.

Ordinary unflavored noodles were not the solution; Mr. Ando insisted that his noodles be tasty, inexpensive and easy to prepare. The problem was flavoring them without making them mushy. Using a secondhand noodle-making machine and a large wok, Mr. Ando sprinkled soup on the noodles with a watering can, then kneaded and loosened them by hand after letting them partly dry. "This allowed the noodles to soak up the soup on the outer layer,"€ he wrote. "I then dried the noodles so they would keep longer and could be easily prepared with boiling water."€

Born on March 5, 1910, in Taiwan while it was under Japanese occupation, Mr. Ando was a son of Japanese parents who had moved there from Osaka. When he was 23, he returned to Japan and, while a student at Ritsumeikan University, ran several clothing companies. In 1948, he started a company that produced salt; it changed its name to Nissin 10 years later. He is survived by his wife, Masako, two sons and a daughter.

Chicken was the prime ingredient in Nissin's global success. "By using chicken soup, instant ramen managed to circumvent religious taboos when it was introduced in different countries," Mr. Ando wrote. "Hindus may not eat beef and Muslims may not eat pork, but there is not a single culture, religion or country that forbids the eating of chicken."€

Nissin opened its first overseas operation, in California, in 1970. Besides Japan, it has plants in Hong Kong, Indonesia, India, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Singapore, China, the Philippines, Thailand, Hungary and Germany as well as in Lancaster, Pa.

In July 2005, the company vacuum-packed portions of instant noodles so that a Japanese astronaut, Soichi Noguchi, could have them on the space shuttle Discovery. Mr. Ando said at the time, "I've realized my dream that noodles can go into space."

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Not everyone gets a bylined obituary in the New York Times.

Even fewer individuals also get an Times editorial page appreciation published that same day; it follows.

Mr. Noodle

The news last Friday of the death of the ramen noodle guy surprised those of us who had never suspected that there was such an individual. It was easy to assume that instant noodle soup was a team invention, one of those depersonalized corporate miracles, like the Honda Civic, the Sony Walkman and Hello Kitty, that sprang from that ingenious consumer-product collective known as postwar Japan.

But no. Momofuku Ando, who died in Ikeda, near Osaka, at 96, was looking for cheap, decent food for the working class when he invented ramen noodles all by himself in 1958. His product — fried, dried and sold in little plastic-wrapped bricks or foam cups — turned the company he founded, Nissin Foods, into a global giant. According to the company's Web site, instant ramen satisfies more than 100 million people a day. Aggregate servings of the company's signature brand, Cup Noodles, reached 25 billion worldwide in 2006.

There are other versions of fast noodles. There is spaghetti in a can. It is sweetish and gloppy and a first cousin of dog food. Macaroni and cheese in a box is a convenience product requiring several inconvenient steps. You have to boil the macaroni, stir it to prevent sticking and determine through some previously obtained expertise when it is "done."€ You must separate water from noodles using a specialized tool, a colander, and to complete the dish — such an insult — you have to measure and add the fatty deliciousness yourself, in the form of butter and milk that Kraft assumes you already have on hand. All that effort, plus the cleanup, is hardly worth it.

Ramen noodles, by contrast, are a dish of effortless purity. Like the egg, or tea, they attain a state of grace through a marriage with nothing but hot water. After three minutes in a yellow bath, the noodles soften. The pebbly peas and carrot chips turn practically lifelike. A near-weightless assemblage of plastic and foam is transformed into something any college student will recognize as food, for as little as 20 cents a serving.

There are some imperfections. The fragile cellophane around the ramen brick tends to open in a rush, spilling broken noodle bits around. The silver seasoning packet does not always tear open evenly, and bits of sodium essence can be trapped in the foil hollows, leaving you always to wonder whether the broth, rich and salty as it is, is as rich and salty as it could have been. The aggressively kinked noodles form an aesthetically pleasing nest in cup or bowl, but when slurped, their sharp bends spray droplets of broth that settle uncomfortably about the lips and leave dots on your computer screen.

But those are minor quibbles. Ramen noodles have earned Mr. Ando an eternal place in the pantheon of human progress. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Give him ramen noodles, and you don't have to teach him anything.