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THE UNTOLD HISTORY OF RAMEN: How Political Crisis in Japan Spawned a Global Food Craze. California Studies in Food and Culture, 49. By George Solt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. xvii, 222 pp. (Illustrations.) US$34.95, paper. ISBN978-0-520-28235-3.
What are the histories and social consequences of "conceiving of a workingclass food in national terms?" (12). This is among the core questions George Solt seeks to answer in his rich and convincing study of the iconic Japanese everyman's noodle soup, The Untold History of Ramen. Solt's attention to class and work provides a counterpoint to the frequent role of "traditional" cuisine in defining national food cultures, including recent washoku heritage campaigns in Japan. In five chapters, Solt traces ramen's "relationship to changing notions of labor and nation" from its origins in Chinese-style eateries of the early twentieth century through its ascension to the most prominent example ofJapanese "B-class gourmet" (8). He divides the book into two sections, part 1 offering a social history of prewar Shina soba pushcarts fuelling mass urban labour (chapter 1), US wheat imports and ramen on the black market in the Occupation (chapter 2), and the industrialization of food and work duringJapan's postwar era of high-speed growth (chapter 3). Part 2 covers the nostalgic rebranding of ramen in the 1980s and 1990s into a symbol of artisanal entrepreneurship alongside the decline of the forms of labour that facilitated its rise (chapter 4) and the globalization of ramen as a product of trendy, transnational youth culture in the 2000s (chapter 5).
The Untold History of Ramen makes...