Love and the Previously Fried Noodle

Another Love Thursday, another paean to another food.  You are going to think that's all I care about.  It's not.  But it is one of the material pillars of love, when love is lucky enough to be framed by material pillars.  And besides, this isn't only about the noodles.  It's also about the noodler.

Listening to the radio this weekend I learned of the passing of Momofuku Ando, inventor of instant ramen and founder of Nissin Foods.  Gerald Ford, an ex-president of the United States, once the officially appointed Face of Smoothing Over, husband of the founder of the celebrity rehab movement, and by all accounts I've heard a pretty nice guy for a Republican, died two weeks ago, and I barely noticed.  James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, died a week or so before that, and if my boyfriend reading the paper out loud and then, more eloquently, Ms. Angry Black Bitch hadn't pointed it out, I might not have found out for years.  In fact, celebrities and politicians of all kinds come and go and I barely notice.  If I once knew and liked the person, or appreciated the person's work in some way, I might be sorry if s/he died untimely, suffered on the way out, or if I somehow know s/he never achieved happiness for more than five minutes at a time in spite of fame.  Knowing s/he's suddenly gone forever, I might feel a brief pang of personal loss plus that inevitable aching hollowness over the quickening of my own life as I do a little comparative arithmetic.  Still, I can't remember the last time I felt deeply sad over the passing of somebody rich and/or famous whom I never met.  And I don't feel deeply sad over the passing of Momofuku Ando, either.  I am a little sad, though, in a very tiny, selfish way.

Momofuku Ando lived to be almost 97, presumably after becoming very, very wealthy through this one humble little invention and the company he built around it.  He founded nonprofit organizations to further education and food science.  Not knowing him personally, it's hard to feel bad about the natural completion of such a long and seemingly well-lived life, and I don't.  What I'm sad about is that I never got the opportunity to thank him.  In fact, I never even thought of thanking him until I heard he was gone.  See, I hadn't known he existed.  Somehow, it had never ever occurred to me that there might be a single guy to thank for instant ramen.  I always just assumed it was some Big Food corporate product type developed by some Big Food corporate group somwhere.  But wow, no, it was one guy, one guy with an idea, some capital, a salt company, and some patience.  What a lucky confluence!

As Robert Smith notes in an NPR piece I heard Monday, Top Ramen and Cup O'Noodles have sustained many an impoverished grad student.  A drop-out of some of the finest universities and art schools in the western hemisphere, a connoisseur drop-out if you will, I wouldn't know anything about that.  I do, however, know about being impoverished.  As noted elsewhere, I've been that.  I've been so poor, so often, and I've made a point of talking about it so openly as part of my practice of conscious gratitude, that one of the first things I am likely to tell someone new in my life is a list of how many times I can remember when the difference between me and any given street person has been the presence of just one friend at the right moment.

I was so poor once I stole food.  I only did it once, and it wasn't very much.  I stole a couple of packets of instant ramen.

For reasons too complicated to explain here today, one of my poverty experiences involved landing in a scandalously overpriced studio apartment in a crumbling Art Deco-era residence motel across the street from a famous beach boardwalk amusement park in California.  The motel stood practically under the rollercoaster, and screams of revelers and the rattling of hundred-year-old wooden tracks shook the walls and floors deep into every summer night.  There were mice and cockroaches in my bed and in my stove.  Sewage backed up into my shower, forcing me to wash myself in the bathroom sink.  A strung-out guy looking for the prostitute who had lived in my room before me tried to beat in my door my first night there.  An assault happened outside my barred window one morning, early, a stabbing, and another morning my slumber was interrupted by cops arresting someone for stealing a car.  I was naked in the bed, just a curtain, a pane of glass, and four iron bars away.  I heard every word.  I fought the impulse to part the curtain half an eyeball's width and watch.

I was one of the working poor, as usual, employed by Kelly Services and making, in a good week, just barely my rent on these palatial lodgings.  I had a lot of bad weeks, though, and even though friends and family did help out when they could, I couldn't afford to buy any food at all until I'd lived in the motel long enough to qualify to the town as a resident not subject to hotel taxes, which came to something like an extra $15 a week while they lasted.

Once I had a steady job, and before I moved on to better, cheaper, and safer housing, I lived on fresh tamales, a dozen for seven dollars, which equated for me at that time to more than a whole week's worth of food, from the Mexican restaurant on the next block, but before that, I ate all kinds of bizarre things, whatever I could get.  One of my temp jobs put me in as receiving clerk in a local Nestlé warehouse, and the sole perk of this position was that sometimes we'd be given boxes of out-of-date food to take home.  There was a week or so when I lived on two gigantic loaves of generically branded Wonder-type bread (thirty-five cents a loaf from Safeway), three or four slices a day spread with contents of an enormous can of out-of-date strawberry-flavored Quik.  If I closed my eyes, I could pretend it was angel's food cake.

But then I discovered ramen, eight for a dollar.  It was the summer of 1987, and I had twenty-five cents to spend on food for the next week.  I had come into the convenience mart around the corner without real hope, thinking maybe I could find a can of generic soup or a piece of candy or something for twenty-five cents, but not really expecting anything, when I saw the ramen piles and the "eight for a dollar" sign.

I had never tried ramen.  Never.  I didn't really know what it was.  I picked one up and looked at the photo on it, a bowl of noodles with meat and vegetables and broth and the words "serving suggestion."  Ha, yeah, suggest away, I thought.  I'd be happy with the broth.

Something came over me.  I realized I could buy two packets right that second and eat for two days.  I also realized I could fit a couple more in the huge pockets of my oversized, '80s style jacket with the big shoulderpads.  Then, if I wasn't caught, I could eat every day for four days.  I was so hungry.  I couldn't not do it.  I looked around furtively, secreted two packets, and took two more to buy.

I think the shopowner, a tiny, older, Asian lady, saw me.  I don't know if she pitied me or if she had been conditioned in that neighborhood to fear confrontation.  Or maybe she didn't see.  She smiled broadly when I paid for two of my noodle packets, and even said "Thank you; come again," while bobbing her head enthusiastically.

And you know what?  I did come back, and not to steal, never again to steal.  I bought packets and packets of that stuff.  At some point I found a brand in the same store called Maruchan that was twelve for a dollar and had more flavors, like the mysterious "oriental" flavor (salt and artificial vaguely savory tastes in a brown broth).  From that point on, I ate like a queen.  From that point on, I ate every day.  I never had another week entirely without food, ever again.

It doesn't look like much, does it?  But add some water,

wait a few minutes, and think what this would look like to someone who hadn't eaten in several days.

Looks okay, right?  Well, it was more than okay.  Instant ramen probably saved my life, one way or another.  So, one way or another, Momofuku Ando probably saved my life.  I suspect I'm not the only person who can say this.

I have been an astonishingly lucky person.  I have been rescued more times than I've been stranded.  I have been loved enough that other people have gone to some trouble, some more than others but always someone whenever I needed someone, to make sure I haven't been killed through stupidity or simple bad luck.  I am grateful.  And sometimes other people could help me, or I could help myself, only because of things still other people I'll never know started or invented, things like public transit and ridiculously cheap instant food.  I haven't earned all these chances, all this aid.  I've just been lucky to be in the right place at the right time.  Even when I'd gotten myself into a very wrong place at a very bad time, there was instant ramen, my own personal manna in my own personal desert.

Listening to that radio program, I learned of the existence of a restaurant in NYC that serves ramen for $12 a bowl, not the instant kind, more like the kind you'd find at Tampopo.  The restaurant is named "Momofuku," but it's not named after Momofuku Ando.  The owner says the name means "lucky peach."

When I heard that, I cried.  I could picture a tiny baby almost a hundred years ago being born and loved and called a "lucky peach" by his mama.  Then I found out that Momofuku Ando was not really Japanese, but Taiwanese, born in Taiwan when it belonged to Japan, and that he was not born with the name Momofuku but with a Chinese name.  I wonder if that name, too, meant "lucky peach," but I expect not.

It's a sweet name.  It's a good name for a beloved baby, or for a fat, pink-bellied puppy about to have a perfect doggy life in a cozy home.  I wonder how Mr. Ando came to have it.  I wonder if he chose it for himself when he moved to Japan.

I don't know how lucky this lucky peach turned out to be.  He was orphaned early, raised by grandparents, lived through a world war that affected very badly everywhere he called home.  He inherited a business, married, had children who have survived him, and changed the world a little bit.  He got help, and he made his way, and that is lucky, especially when you think about how many people don't, even though he must have worked damn hard to keep his luck fruitful.

Environmentalists may rightfully disparage the pollution of plastic wrappers and styrofoam cups which will never biodegrade attending the consumption of Mr. "Lucky Peach" Ando's products and all the copies and spin-offs.  Nutritionists may rightfully disparage the couple thousand milligrams of sodium and strange, multisyllabic chemical ingredients in each allegedly two-serving packet of instant ramen.  All over the world, though, all kinds of people, from imaginary intergalactic anime teenagers to very real very poor people right here in the United States, thank their lucky stars for a bowl of ramen now and then.  It's the food of people making their way through all kinds of challenges, be it grad school, an art career, or simply running away from home.  There wouldn't be Nile Spice or Fantastic Foods, natural and organic, dollar-sixty-nine, instant, paper, soup cup alternatives if there hadn't first been the plastic-wrapped thirteen-cent block of pre-fried dried noodles with a salty seasoning packet included, and then the fifty-cent, shrink-wrapped, styrofoam, soup cup lunch with the dried peas and carrots already mixed in, plus that salty seasoning packet.

So.  That's a lot of luck, and a lot of fed, beloved tummies, all springing from one hardworking "lucky" peach of an inventor.  I wish I'd known sooner.  I am so grateful.  And even though he didn't do it for free, I've got to say that all I feel for the man now that he's passed is love, the kind of love you feel for someone who feeds you reliably.  It's still distant love for a stranger, yes, but it's another kind, too.

Grateful love.

I'm astonished how many strangers I feel this for, whether I know they exist or not.  Every time I walk down a street I didn't pave myself, every time I use a fuel source I never discovered or harnessed, every time I sit at this computer hooked up to yours via wires I didn't roll.  You know, getting us all from place to place, from day to day, takes a lot of our own work, yes, but also an endless chain of unknowns.  Every once in awhile you get to see one of their faces.  Every once in awhile, it's not too late to say "thank you," too.

Happy Love Thursday, everybody.  We're all in this soup together, aren't we?

Comments

[miz_geek]

What a beautiful tribute to ramen noodles and the man who invented (created? discovered?) them. They sustained my husband and me through the early years of our marriage, and I still remember them more fondly than I probably should. The world is a strange and interconnected place.

[yanub]

I was in tears by the end of your post. Thanks for the lift!

[melissa b.]

AMEN.

Great post, Sara. I have been the recipient of what I needed, when I really needed it, more often than I surely deserve. Ramen is seriously another one of those things I NEEDED to find when I had two babies under two and I'm nursing one of them. I'm amazed we survived it, but thank god for friends, family, and cheap filling ramen.