A VIEW FROM

After World War Two, there was a massive food shortage in Japan. So the US began sending huge quantities of wheat. The wheat was made into bread, but the Japanese didn’t eat bread.

Making noodles with the wheat would require a kitchen, but no- one had a kitchen because of all the bombing.

Then a young man named Momofuku Ando noticed something.

People would queue round the block to buy a single bowl of ramen-noodle soup from street vendors.

Maybe he could find a way for people to make noodles easily at home.

He experimented until he found a way to boil the noodles, then quickly fry them.

The “f lash frying” would take the moisture out of the noodles – it evaporated so fast it left tiny holes, leaving the noodles dry and stiff.

But if you added boiling water, the water seeped into the little holes and the noodles became hot and moist again.

Momofuku Ando had just invented instant noodles.

People could make them without a kitchen, with nothing but a kettle.

And because the noodles were dried, they could be kept for months without a refrigerator. So people didn’t need a kitchen, just a kettle. Momofuku Ando found he could f lavour them to make them tastier. At first he only made them in one f lavour: chicken. Why did he choose chicken? He did this because some religions objected to pork, and some religions objected to beef, but no religion objected to chicken. So, this way every religion could buy his noodles. And people began buying his noodles to take home