“a tacitly racist game of telephone”

August 5, 2023 4:32 PM

The Rotten Science Behind the MSG Scare by Sam Kean is a brief history of the MSG scare, when a single letter by Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, led to a racist reaction that touched off decades of panic around the seasoning monosodium glutamate. Over the decades, two men claimed to be the authors of the letter, Dr. Kwok and a Dr. Howard Steel. The latter even told his story to a professor at his alma mater, Dr. Jennifer LeMesurier, who had written a detailed journal article tracing the history of the racist myth. However, Dr. Steel’s story fell apart when reporter Lilly Sullivan looked into it for This American Life.
posted by Kattullus (72 comments total)

Well. That is terrible. People are terrible.
posted by Glinn at 4:47 PM on August 5, 2023 [9 favorites]

Though i have not yet looked at TFA i anticipate satisfaction in reading it.

I think I'm a pretty damned good cook, and I'm not afraid to use MSG sometimes. The mindless prejudice about the topic is a small example of how everybody can know for certain some bullshit that just isn't so.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 4:49 PM on August 5, 2023 [7 favorites]

When trying to replicate certain ethnic foods in the form familiar from restaurants at home, it is often MSG that is the missing je ne sais quoi. Not just Chinese, various Latin American cuisines too. And others, I'm sure.
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:51 PM on August 5, 2023 [5 favorites]

So I guess the one time I got MSG poisoning, a long, long time ago at a department dinner at this fancy Chinese restaurant in San Jose, was not MSG poisoning. Given the years of eating Chinese food before and after that event with no problems whatsoever puts the kabosh on my own diagnoses. There is a sort of chain Chinese restaurant here in San Francisco that has a sign out front that states NO MSG USED. I must add that I really appreciate Metafilter posts that give me one more thing NOT to worry about, unlike the many that do…
posted by njohnson23 at 5:14 PM on August 5, 2023 [13 favorites]

IF you have an MSG intolerance (which are actually rare/nonexistent) you would get an even worse reaction from eating Doritos than from Chinese food.
posted by thecjm at 5:26 PM on August 5, 2023 [33 favorites]

My Mother, a so so cook, always had a tin of Accent and used it frequently...I cannot find it in my local supermarket.
posted by Czjewel at 5:31 PM on August 5, 2023

It makes the food taste like the food.

njohnson23: Brandy Ho’s?
posted by hototogisu at 5:32 PM on August 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Growing up, we could never go out as a family to Taco Bell because Dad was convinced the MSG in their food gave him migraines.

But he had no problem loading up Mom's pasta with grated Parmesan and Romano cheese, which have insane amounts of glutamate.
posted by JoeZydeco at 5:42 PM on August 5, 2023 [6 favorites]

There was a great episode of It Could Happen Here (leftist news analysis podcast with a revolving stable of co-hosts) where Mia Wong (formerly the “ICE must be destroyed guy” on Twitter before her account got wiped by Elon & his transphobic goons) dives into this same history, but has the insight that Kwok is a Cantonese guy whose letter is an attempt to slander Northern Chinese cuisine (and by implication, that Cantonese is better), but it backfired worse than he could’ve ever imagined
posted by Jon_Evil at 5:44 PM on August 5, 2023 [12 favorites]

Czjewel: ahem akshually it's called "Ac'cent"
Seriously though, if you're in the US, Walmart is a good bet.

The This American Life transcript is giving me whiplash with all these twists. Ira Glass Syndrome.
posted by Baethan at 5:51 PM on August 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Act Two of that episode of This American Life about the "Stork Derby" Canadian depression-era race to give birth to the largest number of children in a 10-year period is another serious eye-popper. A triumph of racism, "trollop"-shaming, and eugenics.
posted by DrMew at 5:58 PM on August 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'm legitimately angry that this bullshit - and my own general ignorance of cooking and cuisines other than my parents' - kept me from even thinking about buying and using MSG until just a few years ago. Now it has a prominent place on my space shelf and much of my cooking.
posted by ElKevbo at 6:12 PM on August 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Another doctor, Robert Olney, a psychiatrist at Washington University in St. Louis, then pushed things even further, claiming that MSG caused brain damage in a truly terrible study published in May 1969.

I’m not going to quote this entire section but

a.) it’s John Olney

b.) excitotoxicity from an excess of extrasynaptic glutamate is a very real and heavily researched phenomenon, regardless of how small the original study was - it’s a major neurotransmitter so it obviously occurs naturally but overactivation of certain receptors that it binds to sets off a cascade that can kill neurons

c.) The stuff about equivalent doses appears to be making the common mistake of not understanding allometric scaling and thus appealing to the absurdity of a linearly scaled human dose. It’s normal for doses-by-weight to be much higher in smaller animals! The equivalent of that mouse dose of MSG would still be unrealistic for adult human consumption, but not “pound in a sitting” high. And as far as I know Olney’s chief concern about commercial use of MSG (and other potential excitotoxins) was expressly about infants.

This

modern studies have determined that “almost no ingested glutamate/MSG passes from gut into blood

is the part that matters, in the end. But the scientific bit of this article is very sloppy in its treatment of genuinely important research, and I don’t like the dismissiveness of the use of the precautionary principle over mechanistically plausible concerns much either, even though subsequent research has mostly laid those concerns to rest.
posted by atoxyl at 6:56 PM on August 5, 2023 [14 favorites]

Travelling round UK I bumped into an old school mate who'd become a chef, somehow msg came up and he said they'd been taught (at some depth) that msg stripped the skin off the taste buds to make the food more flavourful. I have no idea if that's a real thing though.
posted by unearthed at 7:59 PM on August 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

A friend of mine did a major funded study on MSG, sponsored by the MSG manufacturers, and the report was buried because it was not useful to the MSG industry. He said the issue with MSG is that chefs are accustomed to adjusting flavorings, like salt, by stirring in a bit at a time at the surface until there is "too much" and then blending it in. With MSG there is no effect of too much, so chefs keep heaping it in from 50 gallon barrels, but the "correct" amount is just a little bit, better to use less. That's what the manufacturers did not want published.
posted by StickyCarpet at 8:11 PM on August 5, 2023 [7 favorites]

If you want to dip a toe into the cooking with MSG pool, try mixing it three parts salt to one part MSG. Season while cooking some stir fried greens, enjoy the result.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 8:34 PM on August 5, 2023 [7 favorites]

I have a tired spiel about monosodium (Spectator ions! Spectator ions!!) and a tired spiel about glutamate (there is a normal range of blood glutamate, its in every cell, its almost assuredly a part of every protein).

We don't call table salt monosodium chloride
posted by Slackermagee at 8:43 PM on August 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

The secret ingredient in MSG fear is the racism.
posted by Twain Device at 8:54 PM on August 5, 2023 [6 favorites]

I've been told by AsAm friends over and over that MSG poisoning is not real and it is racist to claim that it is, AND YET there is this one restaurant in Chinatown where the food always gives me a headache. Is it a racist headache? I don't know. Maybe the food is just too salty or something.
posted by subdee at 9:15 PM on August 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

Y’all ever just sprinkle a lil msg in your mouth? It makes your mouth taste like MORE MOUTH.
posted by Grandysaur at 9:27 PM on August 5, 2023 [33 favorites]

I don’t know, getting a taste for body parts seems like a bad idea.
posted by The River Ivel at 9:59 PM on August 5, 2023 [6 favorites]

he said they'd been taught (at some depth) that msg stripped the skin off the taste buds to make the food more flavourful. I have no idea if that's a real thing though.

Uh, no, it’s not. There’s a kind of taste receptor that responds to glutamate and some other amino acids and nucleotides.
posted by atoxyl at 9:59 PM on August 5, 2023 [9 favorites]

I coincidentally just shared this video from Xiran Jay Zhao with friends today who were discussing General Tso's chicken. The video talks about American Chinese food and there's a section about MSG that touches on some of the same points as the Science History Institute article. One thing she points out is that concern over MSG seems to be applied only to Chinese food and not to, say, Doritos or Chick-fil-A.
posted by jomato at 10:07 PM on August 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

We don't call table salt monosodium chloride

Good point about names.
We call msg "Make Stuff Good". Does what it says on the tin.

From a quick look around, it seems like the people who ARE concerned about msg in Doritos, Cheetos, Jack in the box, etc. are convinced that msg literally causes brain damage
posted by Baethan at 10:37 PM on August 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

I've been using light salt and MSG to reduce my sodium intake at home and it's done a great job. I've probably reduced my sodium intake by 50% and my blood pressure has gone down a little. The BP spikes have gone down a lot.
posted by fiercekitten at 10:44 PM on August 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

Y’all ever just sprinkle a lil msg in your mouth? It makes your mouth taste like MORE MOUTH.

Hmm. Tried this just now and it tastes… odd but I wouldn’t say it tastes more mouthy.

So then I was curious and had honey nearby, sprinkled some “flavor enhancer” on it, and it was … interesting? But I realized what I needed was a little actual salt, so I salted my honey and then added a small amount of MSG. GOOD GOD THIS STUFF IS DANGEROUS.

No seriously, even if msg were as bad as they said, I would still eat it. It’s just the craziest magic.

And now I may have developed a honey, salt and msg habit.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 10:50 PM on August 5, 2023 [40 favorites]

Grandysaur: Y’all ever just sprinkle a lil msg in your mouth? It makes your mouth taste like MORE MOUTH.

I put some on my cowbell for a mixtape I'm doing, now I get more cowbell ... without any sense it's too much cowbell.
posted by k3ninho at 11:36 PM on August 5, 2023 [5 favorites]

The one thing I don't like about Panda Express is that they don't use MSG, so I always have to bring my own.
posted by Umami Dearest at 12:40 AM on August 6, 2023 [9 favorites]

has the insight that Kwok is a Cantonese guy whose letter is an attempt to slander Northern Chinese cuisine (and by implication, that Cantonese is better), but it backfired worse than he could’ve ever imagined

I can't access the linked podcast at all thanks to region blocking, but MSG gets used plenty in Cantonese cooking?
posted by Dysk at 1:23 AM on August 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Good post. BUT, the taste of MSG is vile and also very often an indicator that the food is ultra-processed. Obviously and ironically, that does not apply to good Chinese restaurants. I mean, a good Chinese restaurant will make food from scratch and season with a bit of MSG, and I will not like it, because I don't like the taste, but the reason I don't like the taste is probably the Doritos.
(I know it's not a "taste", but a flavor enhancer, but I don't know what other word to use, sensation, perhaps?)

Since a lot of Chinese food is made in the wok on order, it's easy to say you don't want MSG in your meal.

MSG is a natural element in a lot of everyones' favorite food, like soy sauce, sun-dried tomatoes, parmesan cheese, red meat, I could go on. But for me at least, the "taste" from the powder is completely different from the naturally grown taste. My dear chemist friend always insists that can't be possible, but I think we are learning new things about complexity in organic chemistry these days.
posted by mumimor at 1:53 AM on August 6, 2023

I was just talking about this yesterday [very old news link].
posted by bathysaurus ferox at 3:05 AM on August 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's worth noting that some of us genuinely do get migraines from MSG.

And before you say "that can't be true, then you'd get migraines from tomatoes and cheese"

tomatoes and cheese are also really common migraine triggers.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 3:37 AM on August 6, 2023 [13 favorites]

The one thing I don't like about Panda Express is that they don't use MSG, so I always have to bring my own.
posted by Umami Dearest at 3:40 AM on August 6

Eponysterical
posted by Jon_Evil at 5:20 AM on August 6, 2023 [24 favorites]

An interesting literature review from 2019.

And from this January, expanding upon 'umami:'
The flavor-enhancing action of glutamate and its mechanism involving the notion of kokumi

The sodium salt of glutamic acid, or monosodium glutamate (MSG), has two effects in foods: one is to induce a unique taste called umami, which is one of the five basic tastes, and the other is to make food palatable (i.e., flavor-enhancing or seasoning effects). However, the mechanism behind how MSG makes food more palatable remains poorly understood, although many food scientists seem to believe that the umami taste itself plays an important role. Here, we propose an alternative notion regarding this topic based on previous and recent studies. When added to complex food compositions, MSG facilitates the binding of existing kokumi substances to kokumi receptors. In turn, these bound kokumi substances enhance the intensity of umami, sweet, salty, and fatty tastes, resulting in increased palatability accompanied by kokumi flavor, such as thickness, mouthfulness, and continuity. The requisite for sufficient palatability and kokumi flavor is a good balance of umami and kokumi substances. This framework gives a scientifically useful background for providing newly developed foods, including cultured meat and plant-based meat substitutes, with good taste characteristics.

posted by snuffleupagus at 5:20 AM on August 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

A friend of mine did a major funded study on MSG, sponsored by the MSG manufacturers, and the report was buried because it was not useful to the MSG industry. He said the issue with MSG is that chefs are accustomed to adjusting flavorings, like salt, by stirring in a bit at a time at the surface until there is "too much" and then blending it in. With MSG there is no effect of too much, so chefs keep heaping it in from 50 gallon barrels, but the "correct" amount is just a little bit, better to use less. That's what the manufacturers did not want published.
posted by StickyCarpet at 23:11 on August 5

I'm not a professional cook (anymore) but when I'm seasoning food I personally do think that there's an off sensation or flavour I associate with too much msg. The flavour element is hard to describe but it's accompanied by increased salivation and a sort of glow along the sides of the tongue, midway back. It's hard to know where the line is for a given quantity of a food.

No, this isn't confirmed by double-blind testing.
posted by Evstar at 5:35 AM on August 6, 2023 [7 favorites]

he said they'd been taught (at some depth) that msg stripped the skin off the taste buds to make the food more flavourful. I have no idea if that's a real thing though.

Absolutely the fuck not. The way it works is that tastes buds are sensory cells that send signals through nerves into your brain when activated. Sodium and glutamate are two chemicals that lower the activation threshold for your tastebuds.

It's like if there's a button that makes your brain go "hey, it's broccoli!" and MSG (and salt) increase the air pressure in the room so that button is already halfway pushed down, so it takes less broccoli to push that button (or blander broccoli? broccoli that doesn't hit as hard? ymmv)
posted by Jon_Evil at 5:43 AM on August 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

I always got a kick out of our local Americanized Chinese joint that had a “No MSG” icon on the menu and a handle of MSG sitting next to the stove.

While it’s never really bothered me to eat food prepared with it, I’ve never actually thought about cooking with it myself. Seems like something I should try next time we’re doing a stir fry!
posted by thecaddy at 5:48 AM on August 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

I personally do think that there's an off sensation or flavour I associate with too much msg

I haven't paid too much attention to MSG for years. I remember all the scaremongering about it when I was a kid, but since I loved Chinese food and didn't get headaches or anything, I didn't worry too much about it.

However, I do think MSG has a flavor, or sensation, that makes it detectable in enough quantity in not a particularly pleasant way. The first time I ever tried Chik Fil A (years ago) my immediate thought was "this isn't very good and it tastes strongly of MSG." I don't really understand why it's so popular.

On the other hand, Doritos are a comfort food for me and I've never noticed an MSG flavor. Maybe there isn't as much, or the cheesy-spicy flavor makes it less noticeable.
posted by Serene Empress Dork at 6:35 AM on August 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Doritos are all about glutamate in half a dozen forms. The natural stuff is definitely masking the helper molecules.
posted by JoeZydeco at 6:55 AM on August 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

but has the insight that Kwok is a Cantonese guy whose letter is an attempt to slander Northern Chinese cuisine (and by implication, that Cantonese is better), but it backfired worse than he could’ve ever imagined

For regional + cultural reasons, this is cracking me up and this episode has just shot up the queue of my playlist
posted by cendawanita at 7:10 AM on August 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Now I have to buy some MSG for my kitchen. I've thought about buying it before, but it's something I never remember to look for when I'm shopping.
posted by SoberHighland at 7:12 AM on August 6, 2023

The tragically hilarious part about all this is that in Asia, specifically in East Asian and Southeast Asian cuisine, because of this dumbass thing, cooks here make a big point boasting about having no msg too. All thanks to what we read from american media. To repeat myself on fedi: Global cultural hegemony for the assist to score the biggest own-goal yet, thank you Dr Kwok.
posted by cendawanita at 7:53 AM on August 6, 2023 [7 favorites]

I didn't know about MSG's origins in Japanese colonialism:

As Japan colonized much of East Asia in the early 1900s, MSG followed the sword. Ajinomoto’s products became associated with Japanese imperialism, especially in China.
posted by doctornemo at 9:02 AM on August 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

But also you can mix MSG with salt to line the rim of an appropriate cocktail.
posted by aubilenon at 9:03 AM on August 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

There's a fun bit in an Andrew Vacchs series about a Chinese restaurant which is actually a front for (mostly?) benevolent crooks and gangsters. It does function as a real place where you can get food and has a storefront, but only for their associates. When civilians enter, the staff chase them away by proclaiming "lots of MSG on our food!"
posted by doctornemo at 9:04 AM on August 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

Is it weird that my first association with MSG is Lydia making a reference to it in BEETLEJUICE?
posted by brundlefly at 9:17 AM on August 6, 2023

So: MSG is perfectly safe for most people, but some people genuinely do get short lived but annoying side effects from MSG (headache, migraine, restless legs syndrome flaring up, racing heart rate, insomnia.)

Person: Eats chips that have always been MSG free until now

Person: Has symptoms

Person: Looks at ingredient label and sees the dreaded additive 621 in small print, "Oh, damn, they've added MSG!"

It is really annoying when your favourite brand of salt and vinegar chips suddenly adds MSG to its recipe, and now there are no chips you can eat except "plain salt."
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:06 AM on August 6, 2023 [9 favorites]

Chicken bullion powder is an excellent intro to the joys of msg.
posted by Keith Talent at 11:23 AM on August 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Travelling round UK I bumped into an old school mate who'd become a chef, somehow msg came up and he said they'd been taught (at some depth) that msg stripped the skin off the taste buds to make the food more flavourful. I have no idea if that's a real thing though.

Huh, I had a friend in the late 90s who went to cooking school in San Francisco and said the same thing. It sounded suspect at the time, even though I am a person who regularly got headaches from eating the single serving bags of Doritos that came out of vending machines.
posted by oneirodynia at 11:26 AM on August 6, 2023

I have been amused/dismayed by the panic over MSG for several decades now. Aside from the people for whom MSG and other glutamate-rich foods are a migraine trigger (and perhaps a few others), MSG is both widely used and harmless. Back in the 1970s I worked as a dishwasher in a popular restaurant in town, that today is remembered mostly for its salad; a typical recipe is here. It just so happens that every online recipe is full of errors, from the history/location of the restaurant to the technique of preparing the salad. (It was prepared tableside with pre-prepped ingredients, much like a Caesar Salad.). I know this because early in the evening when there weren’t a lot of dishes to wash one of my other jobs was prepping the salads. And the one ingredient that is always left out is a heaping spoonful of Accent (or Ac’cent if you prefer), AKA pure MSG. The recipes I have seen all substitute Parmesan cheese, which makes sense, but isn’t the same as the original. And for years I saw people eat there and rave about the salad (which is good but not all that special; maybe it’s because it has pita bread in it, which was pretty exotic for Augusta, GA in the 1970s) while asking for “no MSG” in their Chinese food. I invariably got a blank stare when I pointed out that they were eating MSG in lots of non-Chinese foods already. I am glad to see MSG being reappraised; it might actually be good for some people as a salt substitute.
posted by TedW at 11:31 AM on August 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

If you have one of those sort of pan-immigrant grocery stores near you, I highly recommend the Eastern European all purpose seasoning Vegeta, which is loaded with MSG and kind of fab. Big believer in that stuff.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 3:59 PM on August 6, 2023

My roommate had some MSG for cooking and had it in a jar like our sugar jar. One morning in my pre-coffee confusion I put a spoonful in my oatmeal and sat down to eat. Immediately had to wash my mouth out, more from surprise at getting savory instead of sweet. But there were some delicious dishes made intentionally with the MSG.
posted by arachnidette at 5:55 PM on August 6, 2023

I started using MSG at home about a year ago. It’s great. I cook for a family of four (plus leftovers) and use about 1/8 of a teaspoon in whatever (tonight it was a Spanish tortilla with a dozen eggs and two pounds of potatoes and onions). There is definitely a thread hold where it is perceptible. It enhances salt a bit too, so it took a while to learn to back off the salt enough. My local Korean market has a salt/MSG blend that is quite nice.

I was listening to Splendid table a few weeks ago and they had on a panel of cheffy people talking about cheffy things. The question of chef’s cooking hacks at home came up and the first response was that he would say MSG but everyone knows that already.
posted by slogger at 6:08 PM on August 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

There is a sort of chain Chinese restaurant here in San Francisco that has a sign out front that states NO MSG USED

Hey restaurant, thanks for letting us know you'll be serving flavorless garbage!

I would choose to go elsewhere, I like my food to taste good. Joking but not so much, we had one of those around were I used to work, and it was just bland.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 7:48 AM on August 7, 2023

Hey restaurant, thanks for letting us know you'll be serving flavorless garbage!

I think a Chinese restaurant reacting to a racist scare should probably not be criticized and faulted for trying to survive in a white supremacist culture
posted by paimapi at 7:54 AM on August 7, 2023 [10 favorites]

also I think people may want to get to this part of the podcast that is especially infuriating before dumping on a fake Dr. Kwok:

Howard Steele: And I decided, well, I'll write a little article and send it over there. So I went home and I just sat down and wrote a letter to the editor of the Journal of Medicine in New England. And I didn't sign it with my name, but I signed it Ho Man Kwok-- H-O, one word, M-A-N, one word, Kwok, K-W-O-K, figuring that someone, when they got this letter, would realize that what that word was was a breakdown of a not nice word we used to use all the time when someone was a jerk. We call him a human crock of you know what.

coincidentally, this is also why I despise puns of my own name (which is not Westernized). there's been just a little too much punning of Chinese names into racist bullshit for me to not consider the otherwise innocent act adjacent to racist bullshit
posted by paimapi at 7:57 AM on August 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Later on in the podcast, they conclude that it's probably more likely that the real Dr. Kwok did in fact write the letter, and that Steele's actual hoax was inventing a hoax where none existed:

Dr. Kwok has kids. We called them, and talked to his family. We also spoke to one of his colleagues at the research foundation. And the son of his boss there. They all said, yes, Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok did write the letter. His daughter said he was proud of it. That he was a concerned doctor and a curious scientist, who'd often post questions like this. It wasn't a joke at all. The thought that Howard was going around telling this story, for years, it creeped her out a little.

(In other words, Steele was likely using a real colleague's actual name as a springboard to make his little racist joke, which is certainly not any better and arguably worse.)
posted by eponym at 9:39 AM on August 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

For virtually nothing, I bought a 1Kg bag of pure MSG several years ago and it has immeasurably improved *so* many of my dishes. A little bit goes a long way and 1 Kg appears nigh-inexhaustible at current usage rates. By faking this scare, these physicians led to the deaths of at least thousands of people with cardiac disease who avoided MSG and instead over-seasoned with pure salt.
posted by meehawl at 2:08 PM on August 7, 2023

That the Olney paper is so terrible yet has 2500+ citations is a crime against reason itself.
posted by meehawl at 2:35 PM on August 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Schaumburg's is worse, but it was much earlier.
posted by meehawl at 2:40 PM on August 7, 2023

I never understood the weird anti-MSG thing. I’ve been liberally adding Maggi seasoning sauce for that hit of MSG to my cooking for decades.it makes everything taste better. In Canada we get the good stuff with MSG, but apparently the USA version is MSG-free. How sad.
posted by fimbulvetr at 11:11 PM on August 7, 2023

meehawl.... 1kg!!!!

You should prepare gift packages for your loved ones with that!
posted by WaterAndPixels at 7:00 AM on August 8, 2023

there's been just a little too much punning of Chinese names into racist bullshit for me to not consider the otherwise innocent act adjacent to racist bullshit

(not to be too pedantic but those were fake names used for korean pilots flying a korean airline; the point still holds)
posted by i used to be someone else at 7:20 AM on August 8, 2023

The real pilots were Korean, but the fake names were in large part Chinese.
posted by mbrubeck at 8:45 AM on August 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

That the Olney paper is so terrible yet has 2500+ citations is a crime against reason itself.

It’s massively cited because it’s the beginning of a career-long investigation into excitotoxicity, a now well established phenomenon that’s implicated in a range of neurological disorders, by the person who coined the term (though Wikipedia mentions that the very first recorded observation of glutamate toxicity was from a Japanese researcher, Hayashi, so perhaps he should get more credit in this). It’s not a standalone expression of a grudge against Chinese restaurants. And if anything looking at the actual paper shows that the article treated it more unfairly than I thought - the article cherry-picks the highest doses and gets the conversion to human doses wrong, while the paper observes brain damage in infant mice at a dose an order of magnitude lower, and makes it clear that Olney’s primary concern in this basis was about developmental effects.
posted by atoxyl at 10:57 AM on August 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

The key question about food safety was always whether dietary glutamate could actually translate to harmfully elevated levels in the brain, and in general for adult humans at realistic intake levels it doesn’t seem like it does. But I think this article could have been a lot clearer that the mechanism of toxicity once you do have too much in the brain is real, and less arbitrarily insulting about the science that got us to that understanding. And maybe not taken potshots at Ralph Nader for being concerned about additives in baby food?
posted by atoxyl at 11:49 AM on August 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

MSG is also used frequently in Vietnamese food. A while ago there was a pho place near my mom's that advertised itself as not using MSG. My mom and I went to try and it was just not the same. We never came back, and they didn't stay in business for long.
posted by numaner at 1:50 PM on August 8, 2023

The real pilots were Korean, but the fake names were in large part Chinese.

i would be surprised if most americans would be able to identify which names, let alone faces, are korean and which are chinese with better than 50% accuracy but okay

i would be surprised if most americans realized that a lot of japanese and chinese restaurants are korean owned and operated because those were recognizable and marketable asian cuisines, exotic but not too foreign, during the 70-90s, in the midst of the msg panic

i would be surprised if my younger self somehow didn't get the same "ch*ng ch*ng ding dong rikki tikki tembo no sa rembo chari bari uchi pip peri pembo" jokes because that was "in large part chinese" and not korean

let me go get a time machine and tell her what happened to her didn't because she's not chinese
posted by i used to be someone else at 1:56 PM on August 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

anyway, a little msg goes a long way, and i don't think it works for every dish but there's a reason why ajinomoto is named aji no moto

brains and stories are strange things. i think a lot of people who are convinced that msg is a dangerous additive were told this and internalized it; it's no different than some peoples' gut reactions to, say, durian, balut, surströmming--even if there's no reason the person reacting that way should be. as a child i was absolutely convinced that ice cream sandwiches would make me burst out into hives after one allergic reaction, so much so that the few times i had it i began itching all over even though i had no hives.

that said, it's quite possible some people do have physical reactions to it because of other factors, and their experience with msg-related issues isn't exclusive to chinese food.

i think that's in part why the continuing hate for msg is so insidious; it took root because there was a preexisting bias against cheap chinese restaurants, which was only emboldened by racist stereotypes of what kind of meat they served and standards of cleanliness, but when the focus became "msg", it was easy to medicalize it, pasteurize the hate, and make it not about racial animus but personal wellness.

mind you, even if the animus might be "in large part chinese" it still hits other asians just as hard
posted by i used to be someone else at 2:06 PM on August 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

and i mean, while chinese restaurants are by far the ones most commonly linked with msg, other asian restaurants and recipe blogs and so on often have to field the exact same questions about msg
posted by i used to be someone else at 2:13 PM on August 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

i used to be someone else, as a Japanese American, I have also experienced this form of ignorance and racism first-hand. I was not trying to erase the anti-Korean racism in the Asiana incident, only trying to point out that it can be both anti-Korean and anti-Chinese at the same time. Sorry for not saying more to clarify that.
posted by mbrubeck at 2:56 PM on August 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

i used to be someone else, if it helps, I was pointing to the usage of the Wade-Giles anglicization of Chinese names which were used to create the edgelord puns

I think it's a white supremacist thing to then confuse and conflate ethnically Chinese names with Korean pilots which imh(yperbolic)o is a demonstrably worse, like actually multi-layered work of race-based dehumanization. I brought this up because it shows a considered history of intentionally racist thought, like we're so deep in the racist cinematic universe that crossovers are starting to happen - see the condolence-dissolving puns made in the immediate wake of a huge tragedy including, as an artistic flourish, the reduction of billions of people, all with unique histories and identities and lived experiences of war crimes committed against one another, to a singular monolith

but, intention aside, I do want to apologize that I wasn't more overtly empathetic to your experience. the same way I'm like 'yall weebs know about the Nanjing Datousa right,' I wasn't very good about seeing it from the perspective of a Korean person who had to reckon with it as a cultural tragedy. that is my b - I could be better about that and will try to do so

I will say that one of the really beautiful things about being in a pan-Asian diaspora is that we all get to, in considered unison, thrive in white supremacy. I think the focus here for me is that this MSG scare both sucked but that the conversation is still reduced to a 'whoopsie, sorry about that - whites' without any attention paid to the complex way that this rumor resulted in harassment of all of our communities in different ways

with how they've essentially 1) buried the history of the Japanese researcher who pragmatically sought to make the suffering of the food insecure slightly better in the moment, the placebo effect of adding a meaty taste to simple carbs a beautifully tragic project a story I'd much rather watch than fucking Oppenheimer

and 2) the fact that some of us do have reactions to MSG (myself included) - like straight up wheezing a bit, heavy breathing, hopefully not reddening but yeah, now the white people have me feeling embarrassed about something that was just them being racist lol but also fuck

but it is kinda nice seeing fellow APIDA folks here in this thread, talking about how we've all known about this shit for years, where's my reparations. bc I know y'all will have my back when it comes to white people being problematic on this site :)
posted by paimapi at 8:10 AM on August 12, 2023 [2 favorites]