The Eternal Life of the Instant Noodle
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 18 November 2018
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What is the most traded legal item in US prisons? Instant Noodles. Celia Hatton explores the story behind instant noodles. It's a journey that starts in Japan, at the nation's instant noodle museum, and then takes her to China, still the world's number one market for "convenient noodles" as they're known there. And she hears why instant noodles have emerged as the prisoners' currency of choice.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the eternal life of the Instant Noodle. |
| 0:15.0 | This is the BBC World Service and I'm Celia Hatton. |
| 0:20.0 | You just pour a bunch of hot water in and it's good to go. |
| 0:26.0 | Back in 2004, Kiran Danger Dooli was 20, training to be a teacher in Dunedin in southern New Zealand. |
| 0:33.2 | It's cold, damp, moist. |
| 0:40.4 | I was the only guy in a class of 40 people. I think then I realized that maybe this might not be the employment situation I'm looking at in the future. |
| 0:51.0 | But Kiran had a dream to be a movie director. |
| 0:55.0 | Being a 20 year old male, I was also trying to impress females. |
| 1:00.0 | And one night he saw a film that gave him an idea. |
| 1:03.0 | It was supersized me and I latched onto it and I thought, |
| 1:07.0 | well, you know, old Morgan Spurlock, |
| 1:09.0 | he's a bit of a legend as far as I'm concerned. |
| 1:11.0 | And I thought, well, you know, I'll make the sacrifice. |
| 1:14.4 | I can give this a shot too. In his super-sized me documentary, Morgan Spurlock eats nothing |
| 1:21.9 | but McDonald's for a month, recording the dramatic physical and mental effects that has. |
| 1:27.0 | I was living in a student town on a student budget. |
| 1:31.0 | Couldn't really afford McDonald's every day or Kentucky for a chicken or |
| 1:34.6 | Burger King or whatever. So I took the easy route really. Noodles. And when we |
| 1:40.0 | say noodles, you mean instant noodles, right? I mean the kind where you add hot water. |
| 1:44.8 | 10 minute noodles, a wee small square, well oblong sort of packet ones. |
| 1:50.1 | Here, breakfast, lunch and dinner. I anticipated four to five packets, that's what I tried to stick with. |
| 1:57.0 | Water was the only other thing I had. |
... |
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