“I like ramen. It’s cheap, fast, and lethally malnutritive. A perfect trinity. Now, if I could afford to have ramen where it is made, I would, but being the barfly that I am I have to eat the instant stuff.

So I recently tried to figure out which brand is the best, which if you actually have any sense of taste at all is like trying to figure out which of six dead horses you want to carry over a mountain. In your mouth. In short, with exactly no exceptions, instant ramen is bad.

But it’s bad in that addictive way that a couple of exposures will render into a special kind of compulsion for more. And more. I mean, hey, it’s not entirely poisonous even though it fails to qualify as actual food.

By the way, you can ignore the pictures on instant ramen. Don’t expect to find chicken, vegies, or anything other than noodles in these products. If you are forensically inclined you may be able to discover microscopic fragments of these substances, but if you do, you should think of them as a bonus. There’s effectively none in there. It’s like culinary homeopathy.”

— Bobby Yingo at Kate’s Kitchen in the Haight