From Luxury to Student Staple: Instant Ramen’s Journey to Pop Culture
Once a dietary staple in Asia, Ramen has become a ubiquitous food that maintains a high popularity in pop culture world-wide. The spread of Ramen to the US and the classification of it as a pop culture product started when Japanese entrepreneur Momofuku Ando invented a new method of consuming it: Instant Ramen. Although it didn’t catch on immediately and faced initial resistance in Japan, the invention of Instant Ramen caused a cultural explosion. Once it caught on in Japan, it was adapted to U.S. standards, and was explored by many cultures beyond Japan’s. Despite Instant Ramen’s niche start, it has now become a standardized product, explored by cultures worldwide.
Momofuku Ando’s invention sparked in response to the rising food shortages post World War II: rice shortages especially impacted their national-food supply. Ando claims that his experience witnessing groups huddled around a ramen stall in postwar Osaka ignited his initial belief: noodles had the power to cure world hunger. In 1958, Ando’s company Nissin, invented their “Chicken Ramen”, the first ever instant ramen. Ando’s initial vision for Instant Ramen had been for the product to be a quick portable meal, cheap enough for the masses to consume; however, Instant Ramen began as an expensive, niche food viewed as a novelty, making it tough for Ando to sell to the public. At the time, Japanese grocery stores sold fresh noodles at one-sixth of the price of Instant Ramen, which consequently deterred investors and led the product to be misclassified as a luxurious item of high-culture. The first impression of Instant Ramen combatted normal cultural standards of Japanese noodles, going against Ando’s original vision for the product, increasing the pressure to further promote Instant Ramen to achieve its destined success.
With the absence of investors, Ando hosted tasting events, taking his product directly to the public. His Chikin Ramen eventually achieved success and became a beloved staple among the public, making it “one of the most prevalent foods in postwar Japan.” People quickly came to the realization that this product was not only enjoyable but was of high convenience. Its newfound popularity enabled both increased manufacturing and cheaper pricing, allowing the product to become more accessible, and a larger product of mainstream Japanese culture. Instant Ramen transformed from being a luxurious, expensive meal to being an extremely cheap and convenient one.
However, its colossal entrance into pop culture led to the product’s standardization and ubiquity through the efforts of competing companies to replicate it. Philosophers Adorno and Horkheimer theorized in “Dialectic of Enlightenment” that the prominence of capitalism in the culture industry has caused popular culture items to lose their authenticity because everything in culture becomes mass-produced and commercialized: nothing can ever exist outside of the culture industry. Adorno and Horkheimer believe the lack of authenticity created by the culture industry is “no more than the achievement of standardization and mass production, sacrificing whatever involved a distinction.” Through standardization, the culture industry takes aspects of mainstream culture that the public consider “comforting” and pumps out products mimicking the original. With Instant Ramen’s spike in popularity, the culture industry has influenced companies to manufacture different flavors of ramen- chicken, picante, chili, and more- to appeal more to the masses. Moreover, when competing companies of Nissan like Maruchan “built off the innovation,” their products’ only differences were their packaging or name. The standardization of Instant Ramen enabled the product’s versatility and allowed it to descend from high culture to mainstream culture. Ironically, this further enabled other companies to produce re-fancified versions of instant Ramen to luxurize the product again. Another consequence of the standardization of Instant Ramen was competitors eating into Ando’s market share, forcing him to seek a new audience for Instant Ramen to both continue to survive and thrive.
Ando went across seas to find this new audience, exemplifying John Fiske’s notion from “Understanding Pop Culture” that culture moves from the East to the West. In 1966, Ando traveled to the United States and noticed the cultural difference in the way Americans ate their soup: using a cup with a fork or spoon as opposed to bowl and chopsticks. This observation influenced Ando to reconfigure his design to acculturate it to American standards because “manufacturers try to identify social differences and then to construct equivalent differences in the product so that social differentiation and product differentiation become mapped onto each other.” In 1971, Ando released the new reconfiguration of his original model, Cup O’ Noodles, instant ramen packaged in a portable cup. Ando’s remodel masked the aspects of Japanese culture originally rooted within the product, by not only putting the noodles in a portable cup, but by making the noodles shorter, influencing the use of a fork or spoon instead of chopsticks. Ando also initially released less versatile flavors of Cup O’ Noodles in attempts to Americanize the invention to resemble chicken noodle soup instead of other traditional Japanese soups. At the same time, he maintained the product’s convenience and the low price point that made it so accessible. Sacrificing some of its Japanese authenticity to fit the standards of mainstream American culture, Ando was able to make Cup O’ Noodles a success in America.
While Instant Ramen was initially a niche product rejected by investors in Japan as a luxury item or novelty, despite its expected popularity upon release, it has now become a huge success world-wide, making it a staple of world mainstream culture. Over time, Instant Ramen has grown in versatility, releasing more flavors to further connect back to its Japanese roots, as well as to also appease consumers internationally. Nissin has expanded, releasing flavors ranging from Japanese comfort foods such as chicken teriyaki to exotic limited editions like Cheechili Cumrato.Instant Ramen has transformed from being initially luxurious and niche to now a staple, affordable food that’s consumed by the general masses, found in nearly every grocery store and every college dorm.
Works Cited
Edwards, P. (2015, March 5). How momofuku ando invented instant ramen - and transformed Japanese cuisine. Vox. Retrieved November 11, 2022, from https://www.vox.com/2015/3/5/8150929/momofuku-ando-ramen-instant-noodles
About Nissin Foods. Nissin Foods - about Nissin Foods. (n.d.). Retrieved November 11, 2022, from https://web.archive.org/web/20071024113621/http://www.nissinfoods.com/company/about.php
Freedman, A. (2021, December 8). How cup noodles became the instant ramen for Americans. Smithsonian.com. Retrieved November 11, 2022, from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-cup-noodles-became-instant-ramen-for-americans-180979183/
Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (1944). The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 1
Fiske, J. (2010). The Jeaning of America. In Understanding Popular Culture. Routledge, pp. 6.
Blake, I loved your piece! It was fascinating to learn about the history of such a staple in many college student's lives. I especially liked your description of how Ando capitalized on the difference between the ways in which Americans and Japanese people were physically eating and consuming their soup - leading to cup o'noodle. This development made me think about the introduction of Stuart Hall's book Spectacle of Other where he discusses four modes of difference. The difference in soup consumption should be described as an “Anthropological” difference, where difference “is the basis of that symbolic order which we call culture” (p.236), those who consume soup in a cup with a spoon, or a bowl with chopsticks. Hall explains how viewing these practices as binary opposites becomes problematic when a practice is viewed as wrong, “impure, abnormal” (p.237), however this also creates power as one practice arises as the correct culture. Americans view their own culture, eating soup in a cup with a spoon, to be correct even when eating a product of a different culture, ramen. Eating ramen with a bowl and chopsticks would feel “forbidden, taboo, threatening to [American] cultural order” (p.237). Amongst cultures, there will always be a fascination in the difference between cultural practices, be it food, slang, clothing, and even ways of eating. As the differences are realized, they are constantly being ranked against each other, creating cultural order and the development of Cup O’ Noodle is a great example of this on many levels as you describe.
ReplyDeleteSophie Freedman