Are we sure?
And the poor grad students mourn:
Momofuku Ando, the Japanese inventor of instant noodles — a dish that has sustained American college students for decades — has died. He was 96.
Have they tried putting him in boiling water for three minutes?
Thanks, I’ll be here all week, try the veal.
What more can one add, except maybe the little sachet of mystery sauce that comes in the noodle packet.
But wait: Ando may not have been the inventor of preserved noodles at all:
WHO invented the noodle is a hotly contested topic – with the Chinese, Italians and Arabs all staking a claim.
But the discovery of a pot of thin yellow noodles preserved for 4000 years in Yellow river silt may have tipped the bowl in China’s favour. It suggests that people were eating noodles at least 1000 years earlier than previously thought, and many centuries before such dishes were documented in Europe.
“These are undoubtedly the oldest noodles ever found,” says Houyuan Lu at China’s Institute of Geology and Geophysics in Beijing. His team found the noodles buried 3 metres deep in flood-plain sediment at Lajia in north-eastern China after lifting out an upturned bowl. The “spaghetti-like” noodles, up to 50 centimetres long, sat atop a mound of silt which had sealed them in the bowl following a major earthquake and flood.
