They're thinking of nothing-but-cheap-dry-noodles-and-salt ramen.
And of course, ramen in Japanese just means "Chinese noodles", plenty of people in china eat them everyday in china and they are just fine. Imagine if some Chinese poster said "Yeah, careful with using that white bread as a currency unit. It sure is cheap, but it's the kind of food that will mess up your health long-term".
Isn't that weird o first glance?
Why not just use the real name of what you are talking about? "Instant noodles," "instant ramen," or "fangbian mian" would be much more accurate and much less bizarre.
> In North America, Japanese instant noodles were imported starting in the 1970s bearing the name "ramen", causing the term "ramen" to be often used in North America to refer to instant noodles.
So there you go. I'm sure it will disappear in time, as awareness of asian cuisine develops.
It happens. It will probably happen less now the world's so interconnected. Not worth four comments in a row!
[1] For the uninitiated, in japan a "mansion" basically refers to an apartment in a building built to a certain quality.
You can actually eke out a decent meal if you're willing to add additional nutritious items (eggs, greens, etc.) to otherwise bad instant noodles.
We have packet noodles too, we just call them "noodles".
Paul Graham has referred to ramen a lot in the past, I guess it's a west-coast-exposure-to-Japan thing.
15-cent ramen is crap everywhere that you can discuss a $50 steak dinner and $3/dozen eggs. The egg in your ramen, by those units, would have cost 25 cents alone, and is clearly excluded.