Ah, instant ramen: friend to starving students and broke individuals everywhere. A convenient and delicious source of cheap calories, it is the perfect meal for getting through exam season or stretching a dollar until the next paycheque arrives. Available in a dizzying array of styles and flavours, instant ramen is enjoyed all around the world, with an estimated 290 million servings being consumed every single day. But while associated today with college dorms, businesspeople on the go, or convenient late-night snacks, the origins of this noodley treat are surprisingly dark, going back to a time when Japan teetered on the brink of starvation.

Ramen first appeared in Japan around the late 19th or early 20th Century, being copied from similar noodle dishesintroduced by Chinese immigrants. These noodles, however, were produced in the traditional manner and took considerable time to prepare. The instant noodles we know and love today, which are deep-fried and require only minutes of immersion in boiling water to prepare, are a more recent invention, emerging in the wake of the Second World War.

Unsurprisingly to anyone who has ever cracked a history book, the War was devastating for Japan, with American firebombing raids destroying vast swaths of cities like Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka, among other better known catastrophes… In the early period of American occupation, Japan suffered widespread food shortages, pushing many Japanese citizens to the brink of starvation. With strict rationing and prohibitions against selling street foot in place, black markets for food popped up all across the country, mostly run by the Yakuza – the Japanese mafia. In response, the American occupying forces distributed large stocks of surplus wheat, encouraging citizens to use the flour to bake bread. But this distinctly western solution to Japan’s food crisis did not sit well with one man, who would go on to revolutionize the global food market.

Momofuku Ando was born in 1910 on the island of Formosa – today Taiwan. After moving to Osaka, Japan, in 1933, Ando pursued a number of business ventures, including a salt company named Nissin. According to his biography, immediately after the war Ando was wandering through the ruins of Osaka when he came across a group of people shivering in the cold as they lined up for a bowl of black-market ramen: “The faces of the people who were slurping warm ramen looked happy. The Japanese really like noodles. Looking at the line in front of the stall, Ando got a feeling that there was a big demand hiding there.”

This sight had a profound impact on Ando, supposedly inspiring his famous motto: “Peace prevails when food suffices.”

However, Ando was confused by the government’s policy of promoting bread production. During a chance encounter with Kunidaro Arimoto of the health ministry, he argued: “With bread, you need toppings or side dishes. But the Japanese are eating it only with tea. It is not good for their nutritional balance. In the East, there is a long tradition of eating noodles. Why not also promote noodles, which the Japanese already enjoy, as a flour-based food?”

In response to this criticism, Kunidaro supposedly replied: “Well, why don’t you solve this problem?”. Whether that conversation really happened exactly like that or not, this is precisely what Ando did.

Ten years later, Ando purchased second-hand noodle-making equipment and set up a food laboratory in his backyard shed. Over several months he experimented with various combinations of ingredients and cooking techniques to create the ideal postwar food for the masses, which he determined must be a) tasty, b) non-perishable, c) capable of being prepared in less than 3 minutes, d) inexpensive, and e) safe and healthy. Reportedly inspired by his wife frying tempura vegetables, Ando discovered that flash-frying cooked noodles not only dehydrated them – rendering them shelf-stable – but also opened up tiny voids in their surface, allowing water to better penetrate and more quickly cook the noodles. Eventually, Ando perfected the process for cutting, pressing, and frying noodles into small blocks, which could be mixed with boiling water and a packet of dehydrated soup stock to create a tasty meal within minutes. For the first version of the product, Ando chose chicken stock, since it seemed hearty, nutritious, and distinctly American.

Ando’s invention first hit the market on August 25, 1958 under the brand name “Chikin Ramen.” Ironically, while today instant ramen is often one of the cheapest foods available, at the time it was considered something of a luxury item, with a single packet costing 35 yen – six times more than a bowl of fresh ramen. Consequently, sales were initially slow to take off. Thankfully, Ando proved himself a savvy businessman, and thanks to a series of clever marketing campaigns sales of Nissin products skyrocketed, with the company selling 13 million packages in its first year. This number quickly grew to 200 million servings in 1963 and 3.5 billion in 1968, making instant ramen one of Japan’s most ubiquitous and beloved foods almost overnight.

By the mid-1960s, however, market saturation caused Nissin’s sales in Japan to plateau, and Ando set his sights on a new market: the United States. With Japanese dishes like Sukiyaki all the rage in the U.S, Ando figured that instant ramen would be as big a hit with Americans as it was with the Japanese. His intuition proved correct, but it was on a business trip to the United States in 1966 that Ando made a fateful observation. Instead of preparing instant ramen in a pot and serving it in a bowl like the Japanese, Americans crumbled the noodles into Styrofoam coffee cups and poured hot water over them.

Inspired by this alternative preparation method, on his return to Japan Ando developed a brand-new product: Cup Noodles, in which the instant noodles were pre-packaged in a paper – later styrofoam – cup, combining the functions of cooking vessel and serving bowl into one conveniently portable package. Further innovations included the addition of dehydrated vegetables to the soup stock mix and a peel-away foil lid inspired by a container of nuts Ando had eaten on a trans-pacific flight. Wanting to make the product appear cosmopolitan and modern, Ando hired Otaka Takeshi – who created the logo for the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair – to design the packaging, which featured large English words in a bold psychedelic font and gold bands inspired by expensive dinner plates.

Nissin Cup Noodles launched in 1971, and just like Chikin Noodles they were initially seen as a pricey luxury item. Furthermore, their intended function clashed with Japanese culture, which saw eating while walking as rude. But ever the savvy salesman, Ando decided to market Cup Noodles directly to Japan’s novelty-minded youth, setting up public tasting events in Tokyo’s fashionable Giza shopping district. The most successful of these, held on November 21, 1971, succeeded in selling more than 20,000 noodle cups in only four hours.

In a further stroke of genius, the event was held directly across from Japan’s first McDonald’s restaurant, helping to cement in the public’s mind the association between cup noodles and western cosmopolitanism. Building on this momentum, Nissin later introduced cup noodle vending machines – among the first of their kind in Japan – that automatically added water to the cups, making the product even more convenient for people on the go.

And in a dramatic example of there being no such thing as bad publicity, in 1972 Nissin received unexpected national exposure thanks to the Asama Sanso Incident, in which members of the left-wing United Red Army broke into a holiday lodge below Mount Asama and held the wife of the lodge keeper hostage for nine days. News footage of the incident prominently showed police officers eating cup noodles in order to stay warm, further promoting the product as a convenient and delicious meal for busy people.

Cup Noodles proved even more popular than Chikin Noodles, completely surpassing the older product’s sales by 1989. Today, cup noodles outsell packaged noodles in Japan by more than twofold.

Indeed, so influential are cup noodles that they completely changed Japanese dining culture. As the product is difficult to eat with chopsticks while walking, Ando decided to change the way people ate and packaged each cup with a small plastic fork.

Like Chikin Noodles, Cup Noodles proved spectacularly popular in the United States, the country that inspired their creation. Nissin opened its first overseas factory in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1973, and today Americans consume over 4.5 billion servings of instant ramen every year. Since its debut in 1958, instant ramen has spread to nearly every corner of the globe, with 103 billion servings being consumed annually. The largest single market is China, which consumes over 40 billion servings per year, followed by Indonesia at 12 billion, India at 6 billion, Japan and 5.7 billion, and Vietnam at 5.2 billion. In 2000 poll, Japan voted instant ramen the country’s top invention of the 20th Century, beating out traditional heavyweights like miniaturized electronics and Toyota cars.

The secret to instant ramen’s global appeal lies partly in its extreme adaptability, for it can be made in near-limitless flavours and combined with local ingredients to suit nearly any palate. It can even be adapted to be eaten in outer space. In 2005, Nissin developed a special instant ramen package for Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi’s mission aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. Dubbed “Space Ram”, the meal combined a compressed ball of noodles with a special thickened broth that would not break up and float away in microgravity.

Yet despite his company’s extraordinary success, Momofuku Ando never forgot his original goal of ending world hunger. In 1997, he founded the World Instant Noodles Association, an organization dedicated to distributing instant noodles in areas ravaged by war, poverty, and natural disasters. These efforts came full-circle in 2011 following the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, when instant noodles were used to feed thousands of displaced Japanese citizens.

Momofuku Ando’s died in 2007 at the age of 97, a beloved national hero with two museums dedicated to his life and inventions. His funeral, held in a baseball stadium and officiated by 34 clergy members, was attended by two former prime ministers, with Yasuhiro Nakasone delivering a eulogy in which he praised Ando as “the creator of a culinary culture that postwar Japan can be proud of.”

And that is a legacy worth raising a glass – or a noodle cup – to.