The public health hysteria over MSG is just that — an irrational fixation driven in
no small part by anti-Asian xenophobia. There is no particular reason to fear or avoid MSG
anymore than you should fear or avoid the other ubiquitous food additives in our lives.
I'm pretty sure what I just said to you is true. I mean, that's the basic scientific
consensus these days. It is also true that the processed food industry has spent a lot
of money to build and popularize that consensus. Should that give us pause?
I dunno, I have no hesitation about eating MSG. In fact I'm going to show you some of
my MSG cooking experiments. But there is some research indicating that a small number of
people can experience mild adverse reactions when they eat a lot of MSG, and I mean a LOT.
Perhaps more significantly, scientists are now exploring whether MSG might be a causal
factor in metabolic problems like obesity and type 2 diabetes, though that research
is in its early stages.
The best single text I've ever read about MSG is this University of Toronto doctoral
thesis by Dr. Sarah Tracy, a historian of science and food. She's got a book coming
out soon about MSG, and much of what I'm about to tell you is drawn from her research.
MSG, of course, stands for monosodium glutamate — the sodium salt of glutamic acid, which
got its name from gluten, the wheat proteins that make bread dough all stretchy. German
chemist Karl Heinrich Ritthausen first isolated glutamic acid in 1866 by treating gluten with
sulfuric acid. And yeah, that doesn't sound very wholesome, but glutamic acid occurs naturally
in tons of whole foods, in particular meat, tomatoes, mushrooms, and seaweed/algae. Our
bodies also make glutimates inside of us from other amino acids we eat.
Another German scientist named Hermann Fischer described the taste of glutamic acid as "insipid."
Indeed, the acid alone, apparently does not taste like much, and it wasn't the focus of
much more scientific attention until a Japanese chemist named Kikunae Ikeda came along. He
studied in Germany for a while, and then while researching Japanese seaweed broths, Ikeda
isolated monosodium glutamate and called the taste of it "umami," which roughly translates
to "savory," or "yummy," or both.
By 1909, Ikeda had developed a process for mass-producing MSG. It was cheap to make,
chemically inert, shelf-stable, heat-stable, easily dissolved in water, and it tastes,
well ... you should try yourself.
Pure MSG is widely available in grocery stores. Here in the United States, you can just go
to the spice isle of any mainstream supermarket and look for this brand name: "Accent." Look
at the back, it has one ingredient: monosodium glutamate.
So, the first thing that strikes me is that it's way less salty than salt. To me, it's
immediately recognizable as the taste of processed snack foods, which of course, are literally
coated in MSG. Defenders of MSG say its reputation has been unfairly tarnished by its incidental
association with these industrial food-like products. The powder itself, these defenders
say, is natural.
But while glutamates do occur in nature, Dr. Tracy would not call the contents of this
bottle "natural."
"That's a product that is created in factories by processes of industrial fermentation. And
the way that companies source the glutamate is that they use particular strains of bacteria
to excrete it into these bigs tanks. And then they harvest the glutamate, and then they
stabilize that amino acid with a sodium molecule. So it's a product of industrial manufacturing,
just like a million other things that we eat."
Indeed, gross though that may sound, industrial fermentation is how we get a lot of things,
like vitamin C supplements — ascorbic acid. It's also how we get insulin for diabetics.
Should you care that MSG is not "natural," at least in one scholar's opinion? I dunno,
I don't, really. Some of the deadliest substances on earth are 100-percent natural. Here, have
some Botulinum toxin — it's all-natural!
The real question is, is MSG harmful? Unfortunately, that totally legitimate line of inquiry has
been permanently muddied by the bizarre case of a 1968 letter to the editor of the New
England Journal of Medicine.
It was, in retrospect, a weirdly momentous event in the history of food, and the history
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So yeah, about that 1968 letter in the New England Journal of Medicine. It was sent by
Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok, a Chinese-American physician and researcher in the Washington,
D.C. area. And the journal headlined it "Chinese-Restaurant Syndrome."
After eating American Chinese food, Dr. Kwok complained of "numbness at the back of the
neck, gradually radiating to both arms and the back, general weakness and palpitation."
Basically a mild fever.
Now, I've read a lot of the subsequent scholarship about this letter and the public health panic
that it sparked, and I think I've come up with the right analogy to explain what was
going on here. These correspondence pages in the New England journal? This was not the
rigorous peer-reviewed research part of the journal. This was Reddit. This was r/medicine.
This was a place where doctors of that time could talk shop and kick around ideas that
were not ready for prime time.
It's also a place where doctors joked with each other, and we know that the New England
Journal in particular had this tradition of doctors sending in prank letters about joke
syndromes. It was like proto- concern trolling.
We don't know what Dr. Kwok's intention was. We're not even totally sure it was Dr. Kwok,
because in 2018, a guy named Dr. Howard Steel came forward and claimed that he wrote the
letter as a hoax. That probably wasn't true, but even if you take the letter at face-value,
Dr. Tracy points out that Kwok is' just kinda spitballing.
"He's like, 'I don't know if it's the sodium, I don't know if it's the wine, I don't know
if it's the MSG. All I know is I experience these symptoms, how about you guys? And then
it became this cultural phenomenon as moral panics often do, and it was a bandwagon effect.
And it happened to coincide with this moment culturally in which people were very invested
in sticking it to the man, and critiquing the influence of big companies and environmental
degradation. It was in the late-60s and early 70s, this was very of the moment..."
"Hey farmer farmer, put away that DDT now."
"...to do that exposé mode of, 'Aha, what's behind the screen? What's hiding in our foods?'
And also, a moment of great stigma around immigrant populations and, 'What were they
doing in the back kitchen that we don't know about?'"
Yeah, it's gotta be that foreign science powder they're putting in the food. I mean, why else
would I feel bad after eating an absurdly large portion of white rice with batter-fried
chicken chunks covered in a cornstarch and sugar sauce with enough salt in it to attract
wandering deer out of the woods? I mean why else would that make me feel bad?
For the record, I freaking love American Chinese restaurant food, but yeah, scholars now regard
"Chinese restaurant syndrome" as a xenophobic moral panic, and not a real medical thing.
But it is also true that there is a huge amount of money to be made with MSG, and Dr. Tracy's
research documents how some of that money has paid for MSG's rehabilitation. And now,
she's worried that we might be in the midst of a cultural overcorrection.
"The argument about Chinese restaurant syndrome having been racist and anti-science and discriminatory
— it act as this really powerful smokescreen for other questions about corporate interest
and the bias that goes into scientific research. And I think both are important."
And it should be said that real science has shown some health problems associated with
MSG. The first thing researchers looked at in the 1970s and 80s was whether MSG might
be neurotoxin.
"Because that was the theory at the time, that MSG could, in the food supply, have the
effect of overstimulating neurons in your brain and causing them to die at an accelerated
rate. So there were studies that, using very large doses of MSG often delivered by needle
— they were often given as an injection in very high amounts — they did result in
strange symptoms like lesions."
But of course, we're not out there on the streets shooting up huge doses of MSG, so
this has not persisted as a big area of concern for scientists. What about when we, you know,
eat the stuff?
Well, here is a very widely-cited report commissioned by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in
the 1990s. The researchers here concluded that some small subset of the population does,
indeed, appear to experience mild symptoms like the ones Dr. Kwok wrote about — folks
with asthma, in particular. But even those experiments involved people eating at least
three grams of MSG on an empty stomach. You want to know what three grams of MSG looks
like? Yeah, that's a lot. That's probably not what you're eating.
These days, the focus of research is on whether MSG might be a direct contributor toward problems
like obesity. Glutamates in our body are deeply involved in processes like appetite regulation.
While the jury is still out on that, Dr. Tracy has, what I think, is a very good point. She
argues in her thesis and in her upcoming book that MSG is certainly an indirect contributor
toward obesity. Why? Because it makes terrible junk foods taste really good.
"This kind of, um, I hate to say addictive — This really delicious, irresistible almost
combination of enhanced flavor and crunch and aroma and all the things, mouth-feel,
that make us want to eat a million Doritos."
I really buy this theory, and I'll tell you why. I bought this bottle home thinking, OMG,
this is going to be the magic secret ingredient that revolutionizes my home cooking. The first
thing I tried it in was a homemade mushroom stock. I feel terrible about wasting mushrooms
for mushroom stock, so I usually just make it with the stems that I take out of the mushrooms
that I plan to put in my risotto. Yes, that recipe is coming. Anyway, it's not quite enough
mushroom to sufficiently flavor a broth, so I figured I'd goose it up with a little bit
of MSG. I put in a few big pinches. And then some more. And honestly, I could taste the
difference, but it was not transformative.
Then I tried putting MSG in tomato sauce. A lot of people on the internet say this will
revolutionize your red sauce. I shook some in. Then I shook some more in. And some more.
And honestly, I could barely taste it at all in there, which lead me to this personal conclusion:
MSG doesn't do much to improve the taste of things that already taste good, or at least
things that already taste savory. Indeed, I had the best results when I sprinkled MSG
on my standard workout meal of bland tilapia and cauliflower rice.
What MSG is really good for is giving taste to something that otherwise would taste like
almost nothing. Like, a Cheeto is virtually indistinguishable from a starch-based packing
peanut until it gets coated in the magic flavor powder.
Here's a fun experiment you can do. Get yourself some normal tortilla chips — the ones that
are just corn, oil and salt. Sprinkle some MSG on there, and then, all of sudden, that
tastes like a Dorito. There's no cheese powder, no other seasoning. It's just fried corn,
salt and MSG, and to me, that's totally Dorito. Though when I mentioned this to Dr. Tracy,
she pointed out that Doritos have other things in them too — things that work synergistically
with the MSG to be even more tasty, namely these "flavor potentiators" called IMP and
GMP.
Science is amazing. Science is amazing! But it has also taken foods that are terrible
for us and made them addictively delicious. And that may prove to be the biggest health
hazard posed by this ubiquitous white powder.
Now it's all over my kitchen.