Oh monosodium glutamate, you wonderfully delicious additive that has been demonized so much.
So MSG has a super bad rap as being awful for you and an additive and blahblahblah - and I'm not saying it's not. Oh wait. I just looked around online. Pretty much everything I've seen so far that cites scientific studies report that there is NO correlation between MSG and the side effects that people claim to feel. These side effects have been rigorously tested; the only effects ever discovered were from a placebo on a self-identified MSG sensitive person. Is it lethal? If you stuff a whole bunch of it in your face by itself (like we're talking a ridiculous amount)(or if you're a mouse), then maybe. But eaten with food? Not at all.
Clearly, the link we should be exploring more is the mental one between our attitudes towards food and the way that we actually experience taste; how our brains and mental activity mediate and alter the signals we get from taste receptors in our mouth. That'd be a pretty interesting thing to investigate, actually, if there isn't research done on it already. I mean, that study, and the whole existence of the placebo effect, validate the fact that how we actually perceive an experience can viscerally and physically effect what we're experiencing.
This whole "holy crap I feel tingly and numb because omg too much MSG" is actually known as the Chinese Restaurant Effect, because of MSG's close association with Chinese food (though, whether it's used or not in Chinese food... I'm not sure.)
Kind of ironic though, because contrary to what it seems like, MSG was actually created initially by a Japanese scientist and distributed by a Japanese company - Ajinomoto - around the turn of the century (so MSG is like, a hundred years old about). Ikeda Kikunae was working on isolating the "savory" flavory - also known as umami in Japanese (and gaining more attention as it is touted as the sixth taste). That savory flavor is the kind of thick, meaty flavor found in... meat. Or in mushrooms, as it's often explained. It's also found in konbu, a type of kelp that's used frequently in Japanese kitchens to make things like stock. Other notable foods with glutamic acid (the stuff that MSG is an artificial reproduction of) include parmasan cheese, marmite, vegemite, and soy sauce. Ajinomoto, which means "the essence of taste" started to produce MSG around 1909. Of course, it wasn't very long before China was able to produce an imitation, since this savory flavor was something the Chinese had been searching for as well. Around 1920, a man named Wu Yunchu was able to replicate the way the Japanese company manufactured MSG and called it weijing and applied for a patent on it, despite Japanese protests.
The relationship between Japan and China during the 1920s was not a productive one for Japan. Chinese people were boycotting European and Japanese goods, prompting the demand for weijing to outstrip supply - so much so that the company actually started to buy Ajinomoto and then relabeled it, repackage it, and then sold it under its own brand as "100% Chinese" (Kushner 153).
Oh China. Never change.
The whole reason I got interested in this though, is from a couple readings I was doing for class. One of them is the manga, Oishinbo, a food "gourmet" comic about creating the Ultimate menu. I just got it in the mail! The English language versions are "bite sized" chunks of story separated by theme into different volumes (e.g. volume one is "Japanese cuisine"). The one I was reading was "Ramen and Gyoza" so naturally, there's quite a lot of talk about China, and inevitably, the use of MSG. As expected, it was one of the things that the characters used to distance Chinese food from Japanese food ("Western" foods I've found, often try to do similar things). Ironic, no?
Works Cited:
Kushner, Barak. "Imperial Cuisines in Taisho Foodways." Japanese Foodways: Past and Present. Ed. Rath, Eric C. and Stephanie Assmann. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010.
