The October announcement that Nissin, creator of “Cup o’ Noodles,” was switching from its iconic Styrofoam cups to more eco-friendly paper made headlines around the world. It’s a testament to how far the food has come since its introduction to the world in 1971. In advanced nations it is a ubiquitous form of cheap sustenance; instant noodles, whether in plastic bags or foam or paper cups, are the go-to fuel for college kids and bootstrapping entrepreneurs. In developing nations, it represents a first taste of industrialized culture. Meanwhile, in American prisons, instant ramen is currency, “literally gold," according to Gustavo “Goose” Alvarez, co-author of the bestselling cookbook Prison Ramen: Recipes and Stories from Behind Bars. "People will actually — and I hate to say this but — they’ll kill for it."
Instant noodles are a point of pride for the people of Japan. There are not one but multiple museums dedicated to instant noodles, and there are professional instant ramen critics like Sokusekisai Oyama who, like a wine sommelier, can send sales of new “vintages” soaring with a few words of praise. And this love isn’t limited to noodle nerds. In numerous surveys, average citizens have repeatedly nominated this seemingly humble food the single greatest and most important Japanese invention of the Twentieth century, far ahead of innovations like low-emission engines, the Walkman, the Nintendo Entertainment System, or even (gasp) Pokémon.
In Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World, I profiled Japanese creators who hotwired our imaginations, transforming reality through the power of hit products I called “fantasy-delivery devices.” To be considered as such, a product had to satisfy a criteria I dubbed the “three ins,” which is to say it was inessential, inescapable, and influential. I deliberately excluded foods, because we need food to live. But there is a substance that blurs the lines between essential and inessential, a sort of ingestible fantasy-delivery device. That is monosodium glutamate, a.k.a. MSG. Its naturally-occurring form explains the allure of foods from soy sauce and shrooms to tomatoes and cheese. Isolated and processed into an additive, it makes even the nutritionally flimsiest of foods taste fit for a king. Neither instant noodles, nor Big Food as a whole, would exist without it.
Instant noodles don’t taste like much on their own, much of a guilty pleasure as chomping on those dried bricks may be. I don’t judge. (Well, maybe a little.) That they took off all over the world – to the tune of 121 billion servings last year alone, good lord – is due entirely to MSG, a chemical compound with a checkered history. Its discovery represents one of the single most transformational, influential discoveries of the 20th century. This is about more than noodles: it is impossible to imagine industrialized food existing without it. For a while, it was the poster child for everything wrong with modern cuisine; then, rebranded as “umami,” it made an astounding comeback as the must-have ingredient for foodies all over the world.
How did we get here? Answering that requires jumping back in time over a century, to 1908 and a steaming bowl of miso soup. From this humble broth would come great things, thanks to a chemist named Kikunae Ikeda, an Imperial Tokyo University chemist dedicated to eradicating malnourishment among the Japanese people.
Ikeda was driven by a question so obvious nobody had ever asked it before: what made miso soup taste so great? Ikeda’s research led him to konbu, the seaweed used to make the base broth for miso soup. His pioneering extraction of monosodium glutamate from the seaweed in 1908 triggered a eureka moment. Ikeda had discovered an all new, “fifth” flavor, umami. It’s a distinct sensation that isn’t sweet, or sour, or salty, or bitter.
Within a year, Japan was producing huge amounts of the substance. Dubbed Ajinomoto – “the essence of taste” -- it felt, to its creators and customers both, like bottled modernity. Ajinomoto-branded MSG powder fueled the creation of new fusion foods, things that Westerners think of as traditionally Japanese, but really only date back to the early 20th century, such as teriyaki and tonkatsu cutlets.
MSG quickly grew into one of Japan’s top export products; until 1941, the world’s biggest consumer was none other than the United States. Campbell heavily relied on it for their canned soups, and the US military seasoned rations with it as a morale booster. Japan’s culinary heritage paved the way for what critics such as Michael Pollan call “the industrial revolution of the food chain.”
Fifty years later after Ikeda’s discovery, his wonder-compound would prove key in another hugely influential Japanese invention. It took Momofuku Ando, founder of Nissin Foods, a decade of trial and error to create the world’s first instant noodles in 1958. Inspired by long lines of hungry Japanese citizens queuing for cheap bowls of ramen in the post-war black markets of Osaka, he dreamed of capturing the essence of this quintessential comfort food. “I said to myself, food knows no national boundaries,” recalled Ando in his autobiography. “I suppose even then I already had a gut feeling that instant ramen would one day become a global food.”
It was hard enough to condense a dish as fragile as fresh ramen noodles into a product with a virtually unlimited shelf-life. Making them actually taste good required chemical assistance from MSG. Yet this too was a blessing in disguise: their fundamental blandness made them a platform for whatever manufacturers wanted them to be, anywhere in the world – a trait the Japanese call mukokuseki, or “devoid of nationality.” Ando’s invention represents “product zero” for the spread of Japanese pop-culinary culture abroad. But it is something more: but a prototype for the way ALL Japanese fantasies won our hearts and minds by making us think they were made just for us.
Instant noodles represented a new form of cuisine, for better or for worse. But Ando saw his creation as more than just a profit center; he believed it had the power to cure global hunger. Like an open-source software guru, he deliberately avoided patenting his process. Then he took the unprecedented step of founding an organization to actively foster competition: IRMA, the International Ramen Manufacturers Association. Even with the recipe being essentially public domain, high cost – five times that of a fresh bowl of ramen – meant sales stayed slow throughout the Sixties.
Then came an unexpected backlash that could have sunk the entire endeavor, in the United States at least. In 1969, the New England Journal of Medicine published a letter from a doctor purporting to have discovered that MSG caused a constellation of ailments. He dubbed it “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome.” It wasn’t peer reviewed or supported by anything other than anecdote, and no scientist was ever able to replicate its claims. But the race-baiting phrase took on a life of its own, even landing an entry in the dictionary. It would be years before the letter was debunked as a prank.
Perhaps the “Chinese” mis-labeling may have helped Nissin and other instant noodle purveyors skirt the MSG hysteria. As processes improved and prices dropped over the Seventies and Eighties, instant noodles began spiking in popularity, both in Japan and abroad. The now-ubiquitious styrofoam cups debuted in 1971, inspired, it is said, by Ando’s seeing Americans crumble the packets of noodles into disposable coffee cups to eat on the go. Monosodium globalization!
By the late 1980s, Nissin had grown so wealthy that it was able to lure Hollywood stars as pitchmen, including Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Brown. It’s true: Nissin actually convinced the Godfather of Soul to repurpose Sex Machine for an epic Cup Noodle commercial, transforming “Get on up!” into “Miso’n up!” and “Get on, get on!” to “Miso, miso!” Takamine and Ikeda would be proud. Or perhaps simply very, very confused.
That Nissin so successfully appealed to American tastemakers like Brown is a testament to how much money the company was making, but it’s also a startling example of how much Japan’s image had changed abroad, and the role an utterly inessential snack food played in changing it.
Perhaps as a result, instant noodles have escaped much of the wrath directed at rival Big Food producers such as McDonalds or Coca-Cola. Instant noodles transformed from novelty into ubiquity. Put another way, the perception of instant noodles as a compact, friendly, and even nostalgic food is itself a mirror and symbol of soft power, neatly wrapped in a Styrofoam cup.
This also explains why, in the United States at least, ramen percolated from mass-produced snack food to connoisseurs rather than the other way around, as usually happens. “Twenty years ago the path that trends followed from the niche to the mainstream flowed down vertically, from high-end kitchens to restaurant chains and eventually to supermarket products,” as the food journalist David Sax put it in his book The Tastemakers. This is how, for example, Greek yogurt arrived in the United States via specialty markets, then inspired chefs and taste-making buyers for boutique chains like Trader Joe’s, then trickling down through chain supermarkets before finally emerging as a flavoring for mass-produced processed snacks.
Thanks to Momofuku Ando’s global groundwork, however, most of humanity’s first experiences with ramen came off of supermarket instant-food aisles. Now hip restaurateurs have remade ramen as an artisanal product for American consumers, transforming the quotidian dish from industrial commodity into a luxury that sells for upwards of $30 a bowl. (A really, really good bowl of ramen goes for maybe 1,000 yen in Tokyo, which is what, $6.50 at current exchange rates?) Yet it still retains its slacker cachet, with ramen-flavored Pringles showing up on dollar-store shelves.
Today, celeb chefs like David Chang (who named his noodle-restaurant empire, Momofuku, after Ando) and Adam Fleischman, of the LA-based chain Umami Burger, have staked entire careers on MSG. They flipped the script by reverting to Ikeda’s original term for the flavor, umami, and deriving it artisanally, rather than using industrial powders. Umami is less a rebirth than a rebranding. It would be tempting to declare MSG finally back for good, but the fact is, it never really went anywhere in the first place (even as big corporations relying on it would love us to think otherwise.)
For a while there, it was virtually impossible to watch the Food Network, Travel Channel, or nearly any food-based program without hearing mention of MSG, in the form of umami. “Born of marketing campaigns, national politics, scientific research agendas, funding institutions, and culinary systems, the culture of MSG evolved in response to its environment,” notes Jordan Sand of Georgetown University, “and tastes evolved with it.”
That evolution continues today. In 2020, Ajinomoto, the company Kikunae Ikeda co-founded in 1908 to spread the gospel of MSG, waded into the American culture wars, waging a successful celebrity-chef campaign that compelled Merriam-Webster to modify its dictionary entry on Chinese Restaurant Syndrome. From modernity in a bottle, to racially-charged culinary epithet, to the next big thing in haute cuisine, the many twists and turns of MSG reflect our own ever-changing relationship with food and the world. And to paraphrase instant-ramen pitchman James Brown, it’s gonna stay on the scene / like a flavor machine.
This was a Great read! Like an extra chapter to the book