Nobody knows when America's love affair with the noodle really began.
Whether it is Italian pasta or Asian noodles, fresh or dried, hot or cold, whatever the shape and size, we are slurping them up. It is said that we are consuming more than 2 billion pounds of pasta a year, and that each of us will eat two-thirds of a mile of it in our lifetime. That's a lot of noodles. Chinese noodles are made in much the same way, except they add eggs and use flour from shrimp, rice, corn, peas, soybeans, potato, seaweed, mung bean, wheat and buckwheat, among other things. For most, it is the alternative food which can fill their need for a balanced, inexpensive diet.