If you are a fan of instant noodles, you can thank a Taiwanese-Japanese inventor and businessman named Momofuku Ando, who came up with the idea for this popular food creation. Ando was born in 1910 into a rich family and raised by his grandparents in Tainan after his parents died. His first venture into business was not in food but in textiles.
At that time, Taiwan was part of the Japanese Empire, and in the early 1930s, Ando moved to Osaka and founded a clothing company there. During that time, he also studied economics at a private university in Kyoto.
According to his biography, Ando got the idea for instant noodles while noticing people gathered around a ramen stall after the Second World War. He said he was struck by the idea that noodles could help solve the problem of world hunger.
Another account of the origin of instant noodles is somewhat different, but it also involves a lack of food. In this version of events, due to food shortages in Japan, the government was encouraging people to eat bread made of wheat flour that was delivered from the United States.
account [ əˈkaʊnt ] n. 敘述，報導 shortage [ ˈʃɔrtɪdʒ ] n. 缺少，不足
Ando thought it was more suitable to get Japanese people to eat noodles instead, which they were more familiar with, so he set about trying to perfect a method of flash frying noodles. Finally, he devised a suitable process and began selling packages of instant noodles in 1958.
set about V-ing著手去做…… flash fry快速油炸；快火旺煎 devise [ dɪˈvaɪz ] vt. 設計，想出（新的方法）
Later, Ando decided to make eating instant noodles even more convenient by putting them in Styrofoam cups. This way, hungry consumers only needed to add water to the cup rather than empty the contents into a separate bowl. The introduction of “Cup Noodles” in 1971 caused the food item’s popularity to skyrocket in Japan and other countries as well.
