Morning Remembrance

Have the editorial page editors at the New York Times been listening to the Seditionist Radio stream? Or is it just a slow news day?

One of the favorite segments on the late and lamented Morning Sedition was "Morning Remembrance", a faux-weepy paean by Jim Earl as "Grief Correspondent Mort Mortensen" to D-level celebrities and inventors who have left this mortal coil. The entire archive can be found here (select "Morning Remembrance" from the drop-down list). The segment for James Griffin, lead singer for the 1970's group Bread, is a classic, starting with "Singer-songwriter James 'Jimmy' Griffin, a founding member of pop group Bread, is now toast", and proceeding down the bill of bread puns from there.

Today, the Times editorial page, as if taking a page from the Morning Remembrance Parade of the Obscure, pays tribute, albeit not a funny one, to Momofuku Ando, inventor of the ramen noodle:

The news last Friday of the death of the ramen noodle guy surprised those of us who had never suspected that there was such an individual. It was easy to assume that instant noodle soup was a team invention, one of those depersonalized corporate miracles, like the Honda Civic, the Sony Walkman and Hello Kitty, that sprang from that ingenious consumer-product collective known as postwar Japan.

But no. Momofuku Ando, who died in Ikeda, near Osaka, at 96, was looking for cheap, decent food for the working class when he invented ramen noodles all by himself in 1958. His product — fried, dried and sold in little plastic-wrapped bricks or foam cups — turned the company he founded, Nissin Foods, into a global giant. According to the company’s Web site, instant ramen satisfies more than 100 million people a day. Aggregate servings of the company’s signature brand, Cup Noodles, reached 25 billion worldwide in 2006.

There are other versions of fast noodles. There is spaghetti in a can. It is sweetish and gloppy and a first cousin of dog food. Macaroni and cheese in a box is a convenience product requiring several inconvenient steps. You have to boil the macaroni, stir it to prevent sticking and determine through some previously obtained expertise when it is “done.” You must separate water from noodles using a specialized tool, a colander, and to complete the dish — such an insult — you have to measure and add the fatty deliciousness yourself, in the form of butter and milk that Kraft assumes you already have on hand. All that effort, plus the cleanup, is hardly worth it.

Ramen noodles, by contrast, are a dish of effortless purity. Like the egg, or tea, they attain a state of grace through a marriage with nothing but hot water. After three minutes in a yellow bath, the noodles soften. The pebbly peas and carrot chips turn practically lifelike. A near-weightless assemblage of plastic and foam is transformed into something any college student will recognize as food, for as little as 20 cents a serving.

Somewhere in Los Angeles, Jim Earl is reading this use of valuable editorial space and crying, because there is a spectacularly funny Morning Remembrance in there, screaming to get out.