Legacy Matters

Mr Noodle

The ramen noodle, a dish of "effortless purity" that attains a "state of grace through a marriage with nothing but hot water"  and satisfies more than 100 million people every day was invented by a single man who died last week at 96 in Japan.

Mr. Noodle is appreciated in the New York Times.
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.

His Times obituary is here
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.
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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.”

Update:  There's an unofficial ramen website here whose founder Matt Fischer says,
Instant Ramen is more than a food for cash-strapped college students (although thats where many of us “picked up the habit”). My neighbor’s health-conscious (and pregnant) wife has gone back to ramen as a comfort food. I offer my final proof of the widespread consumption of ramen, with this data from the Wikipedia: an estimated 70 Billion servings were sold in 2004. That’s enough ramen for about 11 servings per person per year! So, when you consider that ramen is just a simple food or a minor invention, think of what other things in the world have grown from 1 to 70,000,000 servings in the past 49 years.