The supercheap and palatable noodles help low-wage workers around the world get by, anthropologists argue in a new book. And rather than lament the ascendance of this highly processed food, they argue we should try to make it more nutritious.
Ramen is the most successful industrial food ever (100 billion serving yearly). This NPR article acts as a book review for The Noodle Narratives which explores the global impacts of this massively important food source. In developed countries, most food experts bemoan ramen’s lack of nutritional value and see it as a symptom/cause of larger issues of unhealthy diets and obesity. At the global scale however, some anthropologists are seeing ramen as the ‘proletariat hunger killer’ as it becomes staple of the undernourished in megacities and less developed countries, and the poor in .
Questions to Ponder: If the United States is only the 6th highest consumer of ramen, what does that say about the geogaphy of ramen? Why and how did a post-World War II Japanese food come to be so crucial to the diets of those in Papua New Guinea and Nigeria?
Tags: food, agriculture, unit 5 agriculture, agribusiness.
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GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION 