When times are tight, there's ramen

By Christopher Solomon

There are days -- you may be living them now -- when even the dollar menu feels like a stretch and your cupboards are boring or just plain bare. You're not starving, but you are hungry. You are not destitute, but you are broke.

Somewhere in the dark corners of your pantry lies the answer: 16 cents' worth of cellophane, dried noodles and chicken-flavored salt, enough calories to limp through an afternoon.

Instant ramen.

It is comfort food in the ultimate sense of the word: the comfort that you can eat, and feel as if you've eaten, for mere pennies.

One does not hanker for instant ramen. One doesn't dive into the cupboard in search of ramen and emerge with, say, tomato soup. It is almost always the other way around.

Yet this meal of last resort is all the more satisfying, because the alternative -- hunger -- is unthinkable.

Years from now, when food is memory, mashed potatoes will conjure up your grandmother and Froot Loops your childhood. But nothing will say hard times like instant ramen.

You could tell your children that you worked four jobs to get through college. Or you could just say, "I ate ramen noodles every day." They'll understand.

Overpriced at a dime?

Single packages of ramen on the shelves of national grocery chains sell from a dime at Wal-Mart to as much as $2.79 (for the fancy-shmancy stuff) elsewhere, but no noodle-head worth his salt would pay that top price or buy just one pack.

Usually you can score six for a buck without breaking a sweat, and 20 for a dollar isn't unusual if you don't mind playing dollar-store roulette.

In countries where instant noodles are a middle-class staple, an increase in sales usually portends hard times. In Thailand, the dominant Mama Noodles brand has spawned the "Mama Noodles Index," which accurately forecast a weakening of the economy in 2005.

But is that true in the United States? Do instant-noodle sales track inversely with the stock market?

It's tempting to think so. But you'd be wrong.

"Frankly, looking at the history, ramen sales are fairly stable," says Linda Chung, the senior marketing manager for Nissin Foods. "It's a pantry loader; it's a go-to item regardless of economic times. So we don't see dramatic sales changes regardless of the economic times."

Perhaps that's because the financial situation of a good part of the noodle-buying public -- inmates and undergrads -- is never anything but tenuous.

Home cooking for inmates

Similarly handicapped by a scarcity of cash and cooking facilities, college students and prisoners have made ramen part of their institutional lexicons.

"I do get some crazy recipes from people in jail," says blogger Matt Fischer, the founder of The Official Ramen Homepage. "What they'll end up doing is open up the package and then turn up the tap water really hot, and mix it up, and then chop up a Slim Jim and put it in there, and then put in some Cheetos.

"Makes you think that the food in there must be pretty bad."

In Texas prisons, ramen goes for the captive-audience price of 20 cents a pack, but commissaries there sell about 2.3 million packages a month.

At that rate, the 2 million inmates in U.S. prisons would be responsible for about 10% of the nation's 4.2 billion instant-noodles sales. What inmates once priced in cigarettes they now trade for noodles.

Outside the big house, blogger Fischer extends the concept of ramen as currency: "The $700 billion (bailout) will buy you 3.5 TRILLION packs of ramen at 20 cents per pack, although I imagine you could get a better discount at that bulk rate," he writes.

"At 6.725 billion people, we could also buy every single person on Earth 520 packs of ramen!"

Surely a great number of America's 17 million undergrads would accept, for ramen is as much a part of the college as the Freshman 15. It competes on campus with mac and cheese (the orange-powder kind) for broke-food superiority and wins mostly because students forget to snag milk, let alone butter, from their dining halls.

"Ramen really saved me when I was a college student," says Alex Ness, a Rockford, Minn., poet, author and prolific blogger. "There was a time when I had $20 for food for a month. And for 30 cents, let's say, for a meal, I could reasonably eat and feel reasonably full, without yawning hunger pains."

Though many people can't taste instant ramen without tasting lean times, for Ness it's just the opposite: It brings memories of brief respite. It's his salty madeleine, if you will.

Do we outgrow ramen?

Andy Raskin's experience is different.

"I ate them in college to get through. I went to Yale. And there was a dining-hall-workers strike," recounts Raskin.

Though the university refunded the students' meal-plan costs, "that's not a lot per day," he says. The students made the most of that money by turning to noodles.

Raskin hasn't eaten much ramen since, but the experience has lingered: He's the author of a forthcoming book, "The Ramen King and I (How the Inventor of Instant Noodles Fixed My Love Life)," to be published in 2009.

He even runs a Dear Abby-like advice column, Ramen Advice, based on the life and writings of Momofuku Ando, whose 1958 invention of the flash-fried noodle eventually spawned giant Nissin Foods and changed the outlook of undergrads forever.

Continued: The $9 bowl of ramen

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