If the entire (cooked) length of instant noodles sold around the world in a single year were laid out in a line, the resulting 6.2bn kilometre giga-noodle would stretch well beyond Pluto and into the depths of space. It is a fact as miserable as it is marvellous.

Instant noodles sit among the most potent weapons ever devised in the unending struggle against starvation: a product that towers, among processed foods, at the extreme value end of the cost-per-calorie scale and which its makers now proudly classify as a piece of “social infrastructure”. 

They are a portable, resilient and long-lasting store of nourishment in times of need — from dire to impulsive and all points between. There is a reason that instant noodles have replaced cigarettes as the primary currency of the informal economy in dismally catered US prisons. This ready-to-eat grub, pioneered in the late 1950s to feed a ruined Japan in the protracted aftermath of war, takes the prize for being cheap and fast, but delicious.