History On Your Plate - Delicious by Design

 

The "fifth taste" — after salty, sweet, bitter, and sour—has been known for more than a century. Monosodium glutamate (or AJI-NO-MOTO), the cheap and easy way to get that umami hit, was once criticized as the cause of an allergic reaction known as Chinese restaurant syndrome. Although that's been debunked by scientists, is it still safe to include MSG in our diet?  

Monosodium glutamate (MSG)

Monosodium glutamate(C₅H₈NO₄Na), is the sodium salt of glutamic acid. It is designated as non-essential because the human body, as well as a large number of other plants and animals is able to produce it on its own. In the body, glutamic acid is often found as glutamate. Glutamate is one of the most abundant excitatory neurotransmitters in brain, playing a crucial role in memory and learning. The average adult consumes 13 grams of it a day from the protein in food. Non-meat food sources like tomatoes and Parmesan cheese have high levels of glutamic acid.

MSG is used in cooking as a flavour enhancer with an umami taste that intensifies the meaty, savoury flavour of food, as naturally occurring glutamate does in foods such as stews and meat soups.

Discovery

Glutamate has a long history in cooking. Fermented fish sauces rich in glutamate, were used widely in ancient Rome, fermented barley sauces rich in glutamate were used in medieval Arab cuisines, and fermented fish sauces and soy sauces have histories going back to the 3rd century in China.

Glutamic acid was discovered and identified in 1866 by the German chemist Karl Heinrich Ritthausen.

Kikunae Ikeda of Tokyo Imperial University isolated glutamic acid in 1908 from the seaweed Laminaria japonica (kombu) by aqueous extraction and crystallization, when he noticed that dashi, the Japanese broth of katsuobushi and kombu, had a unique taste which was distinct from sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. He tasted the crystals, and recognized the distinct savoury taste that dashi lent to other foods, and named it umami, from the Japanese umai(delicious.) It was a breakthrough in culinary thinking: instead of four tastes—sweet, salty, bitter and sour—there were now five.

Further studies suggested that, if foods rich in glutamate are combined with ingredients that have ribonucleotides, the resulting taste intensity is higher than would be expected from merely adding the intensity of the individual ingredients. This helped explain various classical food combinations: Japanese dashi with kombu seaweed and dried bonito flakes; Chinese add Chinese leek and Chinese cabbage to chicken soup, as do Scots in the similar Scottish dish of cock-a-leekie soup; and Italians combine Parmesan cheese on tomato sauce with mushrooms.

Distribution

In July 1908, Professor Ikeda got a patent for monosodium glutamate. Saburosuke Suzuki II approached him and became a part owner of the patent. Thus, Ajinomoto Co., Inc. was created in 1908 as a subsidiary of Suzuki Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. which began mass-producing MSG under the brand name "AJI-NO-MOTO" (meaning “essence of taste”) - an additive that came out of the first method of industrially producing glutamate by way of fermented vegetable proteins. The resulting sodium salt form of glutamic acid became famous for its ability to imbue a meaty flavour into dishes, or just naturally enhance the flavour of food. It was promoted as a nutritional wonder, helping bland food become delicious.

Japanese restaurateurs weren’t quick to embrace MSG, so the company turned its attention toward Japanese housewives. Japan was embracing a new level of domesticity at the turn of the century and it became a symbol of the elite class to have housewives displaying control over their family’s food preparation. By the 1930s, tall and slender glass shakers of MSG were commonly placed on the dinner table so each member of the family could use it to season his or her own food, just like salt or pepper. Although restaurants and chefs were still reluctant to use the common product that any amateur could use to make a decent-tasting dashi, people had become so accustomed to the seasoning that customers didn’t enjoy dishes without it.

Wherever MSG was introduced, adoption of the new seasoning powder was initially slow. In Taiwan, where the cuisine is based on broths and soups that take many ingredients and a lot of time to achieve, MSG was revered as a cheap and quick alternative to that process. Taiwan restaurants, street vendors and noodle shops made MSG a regular part of the diet. Today, the country remains first in worldwide consumption of MSG.

In China, sales of MSG failed to thrive, mostly because it was seen as a symbol of Japanese imperialism. But instead of rejecting the import completely, China developed its own MSG product. There, too, it was used as a low-cost ingredient to make flavourful soup stocks, but it was also accepted as a product that was vegetarian.

Though the virtue of the vegetarian diets of Buddhist temples was employed in the marketing of MSG in Japan, perhaps this fact resonated more with the Chinese because of their cultural consistency of periodically abstaining from eating meat. Thus, MSG entered Chinese cuisine as a flavour enhancer for vegetarian foods and was seen as a way to make vegetables and meat alternatives, such as tofu, more enjoyable and umami-tasting.

MSG became popular in the United States during World War II. The military had found in MSG an answer to the flavourless rations allotted to soldiers, and when the war ended, the troops came home and so did the industrialization of food production.

It wasn’t packaged in the form of a table-ready spice, as it was in Japan; nor was it sent in seasoning shakers to be embraced and employed by street vendors, as it was in Taiwan. Instead, MSG was shipped to the United States in crates of ten-pound tins of the white powder where it found an audience with industrial customers, such as the Campbell’s Soup Company. The canned soup company recognized MSG’s capability to make bland food taste better. Between the 1930s and 1941, the United States bought more MSG than any other country outside of Japan and Taiwan.

Chinese Restaurant Syndrome

History of Chinese food in America goes back to the 1850s, when Chinese people started emigrating to America. When the Chinese first came to the American shores they took simple labour jobs – agriculture, mining, factories and were not occupying a very high place in society. These were the jobs the Americans wanted for themselves but the Chinese were willing to work at a fraction of the price, so there was a huge backlash against the Chinese with immense violence, shootings and lynching. As a result, the Chinese clustered around other industries like laundries and restaurants, which were considered to be women’s work and hence were not as threatening to the American men.

A narrative started building in America that, the Chinese ate cats and rats and other strange foods. The Chinese exclusion act gave birth to the concept of illegal immigration, which meant that, no Chinese cooks legally came into America until the GI Bride Act of 1945. So food for about a century, was inexperienced cooks trying to recreate what they had eaten at home. This is why for most of America, Chinese food was not worthy of serious consideration.

In the 1960s America became the birthplace of environmental, health and product-safety movements with a focused attention around the risks of chemicals in food and pesticides and their potential effects. Thus, trust in industrial food began to decrease. MSG was one such food additive that was scrutinised at that time, and had received the FDA’s GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) designation in 1958 and still holds that label with the FDA today.

(GRAS status is a designation given to a chemical or food additive if the product is considered safe by a panel of experts based on published studies and a substantial history of consumption by a significant number of consumers.)

Scepticism of MSG’s safety grew to new heights in the spring of 1968 when the New England Journal of Medicine published a letter to the editor from Robert Ho Man Kwok (a Chinese-American doctor), under the headline “Chinese-Restaurant Syndrome”. He claimed that after eating at Chinese restaurants, he often came down with certain unpleasant symptoms, namely “numbness at the back of the neck, gradually radiating to both arms and the back” and “general weakness and palpitation”. After Kwok’s letter ran, the journal received a torrent of letters from other readers, all claiming to suffer from the same affliction. Some readers presented the same symptoms as Kwok, but most were extremely varied, ranging from cold sweats to extreme dizziness. In response, the Journal offered up MSG as the likely culprit for their reader’s unpleasant symptoms.

Thus began a several decades-long epidemic of “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome”, which was most commonly a self-diagnosed condition. In the years that followed, “No MSG” signs appeared at Chinese restaurants and menus across the United States. Reports of symptoms consistent with Kwok’s, soon after eating Chinese food sprung up in conversations and clinics worldwide and studies continued to speculate about the science underlying the cause. 

Is it safe?

In the decades since Kwok’s letter to the editor, single and double-blind studies administering oral doses of MSG in human volunteers failed to turn up indication of a clinical condition. But despite the lack of scientific evidence of Chinese Restaurant Syndrome or the harms of eating MSG, a surprisingly large number of people still insist they’re sensitive to the flavour enhancer. Interestingly, the condition remains closely linked to eating Chinese food despite the fact that Chinese restaurant owners advertise their rebuttal of MSG.

MSG has been used for more than 100 years to season food. Consumption and manufacture of high-salt and high-glutamate foods, which contain both sodium and glutamate, stretch back far longer, with evidence of cheese manufacture as early as 5,500 BCE.

MSG is definitely not safe for the consumer if its consumption is not moderated. In reality, MSG poses just about the same risks as other members of the sodium mineral family. The primary of which being common table salt. MSG can actually be a healthier salt substitute since its sodium content is much lower than standard table salt. In the past decade American restaurants have been implementing MSG as it was originally intended — a flavour enhancer and not a substitute for low-quality food.

The myth surrounding MSG has been perpetuated by xenophobic attitudes towards Asian cultures. The name “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome” itself harbours racial and cultural stereotyping.

A much less publicized issue related to MSG is how the food industry uses it as a tool to keep prices low and consumers happy. Anyone who has eaten KFC or Doritos has ingested it. The packaged food makers continue to use it widely. Just like added sugars, it can be used in absence of nutrition, tricking our brain’s pleasure centers into believing our meal has provided us true sustenance. The food industrialists have persuaded millions of consumers to prefer food that is already prepared. It is important to the food industry that consumers are kept from discovering that their major concerns are not quality and health but volume and price.

MSG is only bad when it makes food tasty in place of providing nutritional value. We should not be wary of MSG as an unhealthy substance, but we should be concerned about its use in foods that were never good in the first place.

The case for MSG finally comes down to food science, psychology and the history of our relationship with food.