Noodles, an important staple of Asian kitchens

By Mehru Jaffer

JAKARTA (JP): I am called mien in China, mie in Indonesia, ramen in Japan and in Thailand I have made grown-ups cry. Can you guess what I am?

If a noodle could speak this is probably how it would introduce itself, in a teasing, swaggering tone of voice.

For the noodle of today has much to swagger about. After all, it is about to become the food of the next century.

"We expect an estimated demand of 100 billion portions of instant noodles in the next decade," said Thomas Darmawan, chairman of the Indonesian Food and Beverage Association and one of the organizers of the Second World Ramen Summit which opens in Bali on Thursday, Feb. 11.

The total world demand for instant noodles is about 42.95 billion portions, with China topping the list of noodle consumers followed by Indonesia.

Noodles got their start in China, where since time immemorial noodles have been the traditional symbol of longevity.

"It is fitting that this wonderful, versatile food should form a list of varieties as long as the noodles themselves," quipped Shirley Fong-Torres, who, apart from eating noodles every day, is a tour operator in San Francisco's Chinatown and a cookbook author.

Noodles have long been an important staple in the Asian kitchen, and in Chinese families it is common to eat some form of noodles every day because they are considered to be a complete meal.

"Perhaps it has something to do with the good feeling one gets from twirling them around the fork and slurping up the last drop of soup," added one mie maniac.

Robert Morley, British actor and wit, is remembered for having once said that no man is lonely while eating spaghetti, a form of pasta that is a European variety of the noodle.

It was Marco Polo, the world famous explorer from Venice who lived in the court of Chinese emperor Kublai Khan for nearly two decades, who is said to have introduced noodles to Europe when he returned home from China in 1292. Ever since, Italian pasta and Chinese noodles have been endearing themselves to the hearts and stomachs of diners around the world.

America has already passed Italy as the world's leading consumer of pasta, polishing off more than four billion pounds a year. Now Americans are screaming for somen, raging for ramen and fixating on pho.

Answering the call is Nissin Foods, only too happy to provide noodles to the United States, where the demand for its ramen grows 8 percent annually.

Founded in 1948, Nissin Food Products of Japan began as a humble family activity to fight the sparse food situation after the end of World War II.

Momofuku Ando, the founder of Nissin Foods, said that he wanted to create a ramen that could be eaten anywhere and anytime. In 1958 he introduced chicken ramen, his first instant noodle. The product sold beyond his wildest expectations and before he could say instant, over a score of companies had rushed to put their versions of instant noodles on the market. Today, each Japanese consumer eats approximately 45 portions of ramen, bags of noodles and cups of noodles each year, while American consumers annually eat about seven portions of ramen.

And instant ramen soup continues to grow in popularity around the world. Nissin Foods manufactures products in 10 countries, and their noodles are consumed in over 100 countries.

Mark Miller, an American chef who claims to be in the grip of a lifelong love affair with Asian cuisine, says that he wants to introduce customers to simple, healthy and inexpensive Asian street food. Noodles fit the bill exactly. Another advantage is that noodle dishes are also very simple to prepare.

No wonder 23-year-old Suyatno plans to make noodles a permanent career. One of thousands of street peddlers in Jakarta, he has been selling chicken noodles since 1993 on a wooden cart which he calls a warung di rumah (food stall at the doorstep). He earns Rp 50,000 per day for giving his customers bowls of noodles steamed in chicken stock and topped with fresh spinach leaves, ground red chilies and soy sauce. He does not care for instant noodles like those mass produced by Indofood, the local instant noodle producer which is the largest in the world with a total annual production capacity of 13 billion units.

Suyatno buys balls of fresh noodles made in North Jakarta by an ethnic Chinese family. These noodles, he says, have a special aroma that does not exist in instant noodles, which taste like straw to his palate.

Mita does not claim to be a connoisseur of noodles. From a family of rice eaters, she got hooked on noodles when she came to live in Jakarta. She begins to salivate if she even thinks of a cup of instant noodles packed in a styrofoam cup. "I have at least one cup a day but I could eat more," Mita confessed.

Although the staple food of most Indonesians is rice, noodles are fast taking over because they are cheaper and easier to prepare. In the fast pace of city life, especially when both parents work, instant noodles provide the entire family a wholesome meal within minutes.

And noodle nuts have even opened a museum in homage to the new god of foods. The museum in the Japanese city of Yokohama, said to be the birthplace of liu-mien, the cheap but nutritious noodles created by Chinese laborers working in the port and shipping yards, painstakingly chronicles the historical development of instant ramen. There is also a historical theme park here and a hyperspecialized restaurant mall that stays open well into the night.

On display are ramen-making utensils and bowls, and the invention of ramen in a cup is celebrated as one of the most dramatic technological achievements of the second half of this century. The linguistic origin of the word ramen is traced by a noodle fan to a small Chinese eatery in northern Japan. The Japanese owner fell in love with the sound of Chinese chefs calling out hoa-la when a dish of noodles was ready to be served. The owner of the restaurant is said to have invented her own noodle dish and named it la-mien. Because the Japanese have no sound for the letter "L" in their language, la-mien came to be pronounced ramen.

Whatever the origin of noodles and whatever name they go by around the world, the fact remains that the noodle has managed to unite the world like no other ideology has been able to do in recent times.