I\u2019d be the last guy to ask about history. OK, I\u2019d be the last guy to ask about anything, but you already knew that. When it comes to modern food, however, anything that comes in a wrapper, in a can, or that you can put ketchup on, happens to be the sp\u00e9cialit\u00e9 du beach chair.<\/p>\n
So we\u2019ll contemplate a modern refinement of an ancient dish: noodles.<\/p>\n
With that in mind, you can, in fact, join me for lunch right now. I happen to have a spare plastic spoon in my shirt pocket. Here you go. Oh, wait, that spoon is nasty. Wrong one. Try this one. Yeah, that\u2019s the clean one, so never mind the fuzz, that\u2019s just lint.<\/p>\n
The Chinese are usually credited with inventing noodles. This was no recent thing. According to a 2005 article on the National Geographic website, a 4,000-year-old bowl of noodles was unearthed in China.<\/p>\n
Of course, if you\u2019ve ever lived in a college dormitory, unearthing ancient bowls of half-eaten noodles is nothing new. From my experience, they tended to flock with empty bottles of Lucky Lager beer.<\/p>\n
Anyway, noodles eventually became a famous fixture of Italian cuisine. How they got from China to Italy is an interesting question. As for the interesting answer, uh, I don\u2019t have one. Maybe this was a legacy of the Silk Road. Maybe the legendary Marco Polo was involved. Maybe somebody who knows the answer will be kind enough to e-mail me. I\u2019m out of my depth here.<\/p>\n
But I can tell you that the Chinese certainly heed Italy\u2019s role in the noodle realm. In Chinese, the word for \u201cspaghetti\u201d is said as \u201cItaly noodle.\u201d Incidentally, the Chinese word for \u201cnoodle\u201d is the same word as for \u201cface.\u201d This makes sense to me, since that\u2019s where I put noodles: in my face. We might as well keep this rolling: The Chinese term for Italy is comprised of the terms for \u201cthought,\u201d \u201cbig,\u201d and \u201cadvantage.\u201d So if you learn the word for \u201cspaghetti\u201d in Chinese, you\u2019ve also learned the terms for noodle, face, Italy, thought, big, and advantage.<\/p>\n
Wow, that\u2019s six-to-one linguistic leverage there, which is why I avoid libraries and I stick to restaurants.<\/p>\n
Anyway, let\u2019s zoom to modern history, and the era of factory foods for mass consumption, food designed for easy storage, efficient shipping, and consumer convenience for slobs like me. Yeah: progress!<\/p>\n
Born in Taiwan, and later setting up shop in Japan, Mr. Momofuku Ando is credited with inventing instant ramen in 1958. Ramen needs no introduction to Saipan, where \u201csoba\u201d enjoys most-favored-food status, possibly being a rival to canned luncheon meat. According to the World Instant Noodles Association, the industry provides 91.6 billion servings of instant noodles annually.<\/p>\n
You will notice that America has been absent from our history of noodly evolution. But that\u2019s because Yankee ingenuity was warming up for something big. In 1965, a now famous staple of American culture was unveiled: SpaghettiOs.<\/p>\n
SpaghettiOs were the brainchild of Donald Goerke, a Wisconsin native who had a bachelor\u2019s degree in mathematics and an MBA from the University of Wisconsin.<\/p>\n
Mr. Goerke was a marketing executive who was tasked with developing canned pasta for kids. It had to be something easy to eat without making a mess and something amenable to re-heating. I don\u2019t know if Mr. Goerke\u2019s math background played a role here, but he certainly had an analytical mind, since the ring-shaped profile of the food hit the sweet spot of the various constraints.<\/p>\n
Mr. Goerke, in other words, optimized the noodle.<\/p>\n
When I was a kid, I ate as many cans of SpaghettiOs as I could talk my mom into buying.<\/p>\n
Later on, in Boy Scouts and beyond, SpaghettiOs proved to be great fare for camping, since they were self-contained in their own sauce and required no preparation outside of heating, and even that was optional because they\u2019re pretty good even when cold. This is one very forgiving food.<\/p>\n
And, for me, it\u2019s even been a food with professional applications. When I used to fly airplanes and copters to remote places like Pagan island and Anatahan island, I\u2019d take a couple of cans of SpaghettiOs for just-in-case duty. Yeah, yeah, I know, those islands are full of nature\u2019s lush bounty of edible flora, but there\u2019s no harm in hedging your bets with a can opener and, of course, a dirty plastic spoon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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