Personal Dork Assistant

Canoodling

In the good old days of single-living, the cup-o-noodles were an indispensable part of the pantry for those lazy days. Although I preferred the packaged ramen since I could toss the salty flavor packet and dress up the noodle myself, although that's kinda cheating (a.k.a. cooking). At first there were just the plain-old chicken/beef/shrimp flavors, but more and more flavors began showing up on the shelves, including some distinctively un-Japanese varieties. I stuck to the classics, and I always wondered who were buying the weird flavors. Turned out that they were heading south of the border. Who knew?

Through the centuries, Moorish spices, French pastries and Spanish citrus have left lasting impressions on Mexico's cuisine. Now Japanese fast-food noodles, first imported here in the 1980s, are filling pantries across the country.

Time-pressed school kids, construction workers and office drones have helped turn Mexicans into Latin America's largest per-capita consumers of instant ramen. Diners here slurped down 1 billion servings last year, up threefold since 1999, according to a Japanese noodle association.

It's hard to resist cheap, fast, and tasty, even if the nutritional value of the salt-carbo-fat combo (give or take a splash of salsa) is basically nil. The instant ramen was born to feed the poor and hungry, after all.

Instant ramen has its roots in aching hunger. It was invented by Momofuku Ando, a serial entrepreneur whose businesses crumbled with Japan's defeat in World War II.

Memories of shivering Japanese lined up for a bowl of noodles in bombed-out Osaka haunted Ando for years, he wrote in his autobiography, "My Resume: The Story of the Invention of Instant Ramen."

Ando, now 95, founded Nissin Food Products Co. in that city, guided by the mantra: "Peace follows from a full stomach." He figured out that frying fresh ramen was the key to preserving the noodle and making it porous, so that it could be reconstituted with boiling water into fast, cheap nourishment.

Yeah, instant ramen's great, but I really hate it when they serve them in the middle of the night on those trans-Pacific flights. The greasy smell permeates the cabin and makes it hard to sleep while other slurp away.