It Could Happen Here - The Lunar New Years Special: Mia Cracks The MSG Case

Episode Date: January 23, 2023

Before the tragedy at Monterey Park we took a look at the history of "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" and the anti-MSG crazeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hey there, listeners. This is producer DJ Danil. The following episode was recorded before the horrible events in Monterey Park. The team will release an episode addressing the situation once more details have emerged. Thank you and enjoy. It's Lunar New Year's. Yay. Happy New Year's. It's the New Year's special. It's me, Mia. I've got Shireen with me. Yeah.

How are you doing? I guess it's not the new year yet when we're recording it, got i've got shereen with me yeah how are you doing i guess i guess it's i guess it's not the new year yet while we're recording it but it will be by the time you hear this that counts that counts yeah um i i'm good i'm i got a cat recently and i called her bunny and then i learned later that this year is the year of the rabbit so yeah i feel really happy about that oh it's gonna be the cat's year for this year yeah exactly oh so i'm good i'm good that's the that's an amazing having new cat is an amazing way to start any year yes yes i agree this is very exciting but do you know what else is very exciting uh transitions they pay me to do this. Yes. For some reason. All right.

This year, we're going to talk about Chinese restaurant syndrome and the whole sort of anti-MSG craze. Yes. So. That was, that's always been so big. I don't know. I grew up in like a, I don't know, a diverse area in San Diego, but we would always go to Pho like regularly. And the no MSG was like all over the menu and everything.

It's like this thing that, I mean, every restaurant I went to basically, it was just like, come to us, there's no MSG. So I'm really curious how it started because growing up I was like, okay, MSG is bad, I guess. You know what I mean? Yeah, I feel like it wasn't, weirdly it wasn't as intense where I was growing up,

but that was like, I don't know, it was a very white suburb. And people were still freaked out about MSG, but it wasn't, but like the Asian restaurants didn't like talk about it ever. I don't know, but it was still very sort of like, like I remember I would go to like eat dinner with like white families and they'd be talking about MSG. And I was like, what? Yeah, it was a hot topic for a good amount of time yeah having now talked about msg for a bit we should we should ask like what what is msg yes and the answer okay so msg stands for monosodium glutamate which is it's just a salt basically it's salt with like glutamate in it has a bunch of umami in it i'm gonna read this thing from Kenji from Serious Eats because

every single article that starts about this has this exact paragraph in it. So I'm just going to read it instead of trying to rewrite this paragraph that I've been reading. I respect that. MSG is a sodium salt of glutamic acid and A amino acid. It was first isolated in 1908

by Japanese biochemist Kikue Ikeda, who was trying to discover what exactly gave dashi, the Japanese flavor broth with komba, Japanese giant sea kelp, its strong savory character. Turns out that komba is packed with glutamic acid. It was Ikeda who coined the term umami, which roughly translates as savory, to describe the glutamic acid and other similar amino acids. Until that point, scientists had only discovered the other four flavors sensed

by the tongue and the soft palate, salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. By 1909, pure crystallite MSG extracted from the abundant kelp in the sea around Japan was being sold under the brand name Ajinomoto, roughly, Element of Flavor. The company exists to this day. Now, keep that in mind, that's going to be important to the last part of the story. But, you know, in the meantime, you know, around 1908, once this is discovered, it turns into this sort of enormous industry. Here's from a pretty good men's health article about it. By the 1940s, a number of American companies were producing MSG domestically for the consumer,

the most famous being Accent. There's like, it's spelled Accent, but it's spelled A-C-apostrophe-C-E-N-T. A-C-apostrophe-C-E-N-T. That's not... No, you lost me. Accent.

Yeah. Advertising is a bleak place oh yeah that's that's a different episode i think maybe it's part of this one too partially yes also partially this episode but yeah the most famous one being accent which was advertised as pure monosodium glutamate that quote makes food flavors food flavors sing. Various food magazines and community cookbooks featured the additive as an ingredient in the likes of fried chicken wings and barbecue sauce recipes. By 1969, 58 million pounds of MSG were being produced in the U.S. per year, says food historian Ian Mosby, Ph.D., for an entire generation. The ingredient was presented in a dizzying array of food products. Breakfast cereals, TV dinners, frozen vegetables, baby food, and soup.

Produced by beloved brands such as Campbell's and Swanson, which today offer foods, products free of MSG additives. And, okay, if you think about this for a second, it's actually really weird that MSG is thought of as a Chinese thing. Because, like, okay, MSG,g all told has only been around for like 100 years right yeah it's heavily used in the u.s for like 30 or 40 years like it's not in it's not really in china for that much longer if it is in the u.s and it's used in just like a bunch of american food how did that start do we know how that association started and continued yeah we'll we'll get it mostly has to do with like it has to do with restaurants and it specifically has to do with the part that we're getting to about this letter which is weird i will say like there are a lot of chinese families

that like just use msg for like their cooking my house never did it because we're lazy and most of our cooking involves like as few ingredients and prep as possible so we just like I think it's also really in Vietnamese food I feel like uses it a lot too that was my first association with it so I just associate because I'm I was I don't know 14

I just okay this is Vietnamese but that's really interesting to just know like well it's really japanese too like yeah i mean it's asian it's yeah yeah yeah i don't know but like it is just it is just it's just interesting like the like people in the u.s were just like i don't know it's like in it was in everything people in the u.s were also just using it to cook food this is also a thing that like people in china use a lot too so it's not that like chinese people don't do it it's just that like everybody like the moment everyone got it they were like oh my god this makes our food taste better we should use more of it of course i mean i'm assuming once it got demonized it was like oh this is a chinese thing

but i don't know for sure yeah yeah i will be patient yeah so this is this is in fact the next thing so nobody really cared about it until 1968 rolled around wow so for those 60 years msg was like yeah i won't just use it nobody yeah yeah um i'm forgetting where i'm gonna read apart from this journal article and i've forgotten to put in what journal it's from because I'm a hack and a fraud. I think it's the journal Natural Health. 60% sure about that? That sounds right to me. Yeah, sure.

It's from some journal. Some doctors wrote it. Quote, New England Journal of Medicine asking the assistance of the journal's readership in identifying the source of the phenomenon that Dr. Guo labeled the Chinese Restaurant Syndrome, CRS, numbness of his back and neck palpitations, and general weakness after he consumed meals in Chinese restaurants. Dr. Guo hypothesized that the source of his syndrome might be a reaction to the soy sauce, the cooking wine, the high sodium content of the food, or to the flavor-enhancing monosodium glutamate, MSG. Within two months, the journal received a flurry of letters from readers who had noticed a similar phenomenon after eating restaurant-prepared

Chinese food. So this is the start of this whole thing. And there's one thing i need to point out right away that is in almost every single article about this that is wrong which is that this this this article says that he's talking about chinese food which is true but very specifically and this and this is this is going to be very important in about 10 minutes well i don't know 10 minutes it's gonna be important soon which is he specifically has a thing about how this is about northern chinese food and you know this is something that's something that everyone everyone sort of misses the the other thing that's interesting about this is that you know he he he says it could be msg but you know he's treating msg exactly like all of the rest of the other stuff that's in the food, right? He lists soy sauce, he lists cooking wine,

maybe he's like, okay, maybe there's too much salt. He's not really doing an MSG thing. But, everyone who reads this immediately focuses on the MSG. Okay, so before I started researching this, I had heard that this whole letter was actually fake.

It was actually a prank. And, you know, this is a thing that's like, it's kind of like okay, so the story behind this was that it was supposed to have been a prank by a white guy named Dr. Steele who made it up as a joke. And this is sort of

like a folk, like, okay, so this story is not true. The story I'm about to say is not true. It turns out this letter is actually real the story i'm about to say is not true it turns out this letter is actually real but there was there was basically a a story that went around that it was this guy named dr steel who had made it up as a way to get published in a journal for like a bet because like dr steel like claimed responsibility for it and that got out to researchers but it turns yeah and so for a bit everyone was like oh my god this whole thing was started by a prank but it turns out that's also not true so this american life figured out that dr robert homengua is a real

guy uh dr steel had pretended that he he said that he made up the name it's not true there's a real guy they talked to his family and his colleagues and all of them were like oh no guo like wrote this thing and interestingly there's a lot of racism here too because dr steel had claimed that homan guo which is okay so this is where things get weird um i'm saying guo because that's how you actually pronounce it um it's spelled h-o-m-a-N-K-W-O-K. Whoa. Yeah, okay, so this is some... That's not what I thought. Yeah, so this is some Wade Giles bullshit.

The previous attempt to sort of Romanize Chinese was this thing called Wade Giles. It is the bane of my existence. It's dog shit. Hi, this is Mia in post. I made a mistake here. K-W-O-K is actually the standard Cantonese spelling of guo. Sorry about that. I am a dipshit. K-W-O-K is actually the standard Cantonese spelling of guo. Sorry about that.

I am a dipshit who does not speak Cantonese. Yeah, enjoy the rest of the show. They heard someone say guo, and were like, this is K-W. It was like, no! No, it's not! Please! That's bad. It's literally the worst.

Sometimes if you're looking at Chinese, you'll see something that's just spelled really weirdly like or for example like the way that chen kai shek is spelled is actually like like it is actually a way giles thing like there's a whole bunch of like things that are like that yeah yeah you can find um i don't know that that's i mean that explains a lot, but unfortunately... Yeah, and part of the other thing that's happening too here is that like... And then this is also going to be important later. Guo is a Cantonese last name.

But it gets really, really confusing really quickly if you don't know what's going on. Because if you're reading a word that's in Chinese in the US, it could either be in Mandarin or in Cantonese, and it also could be either written with the terrible way Zhao is one, or it could be in Pinyin, which is like the one that's actually sort of usable. But Dr. Steele, because again, the way it's written is H-O-M-A-N-K-W-O-K. And Dr. Steele claims that he wrote it to be like human crock of shit. Like, ho man crock. Yeah.

Excuse me? People believed him. Dr. Steele needs to be... Yeah, well, he's dead, so fuck him. Married again. Yeah. Yeah. That's so disgusting yeah like this is

this is so racist and it's like oh you know but this like people people believe this for a while because yeah i don't know but okay so eventually people figure out that it's not true and i'm gonna read something from from the this american Life piece where they talk about how they figured out that it was actually, like, that Hou Meng Guo was, like, actually a real guy. And when you read the original letter, there are details that seem more likely to come from her father, which is Guo's father, than from Howard. Howard Steele is the doctor. the doctor. Like when he said he moved to the US, which the real Dr. Guo did, and how he's very specific the syndrome happens with northern Chinese food. In the 60s, how many white guys in Philadelphia could have made that distinction? Also, oh man, Guo is an actual Cantonese name. What are the odds that Dr. Steele threw together random sounding Chinese syllables to arrive at that? So, okay, I read that and I had a revelation.

I cracked this case wide the fuck open. I figured it out. I figured out what was going on with this letter. I'm so excited for this. I've been hyping this up for like hours. I'm so excited. Some BTS of this. We have like a group chat essentially and I

wasn't sure if I could make this recording but then mia dropped that that bomb being like i have this big break breakthrough and i was like i gotta be there i just gotta be there and so i kicked james out because james couldn't make the time i could make and so here i apologize i have i have i have not told shireen what the breakthrough is. No, I am very excited to hear. Okay, so Hongmenguo is Cantonese, right? And he specifies in this letter that this is about northern Chinese food. My thesis right here, right now, is that this whole letter is actually about Cantonese anti-northern sentiment.

This is a whole ass thing in china so canton or like the the region that was called canton the west is like where cantonese people are this is like this is the very south of china right there is a whole ass thing in china let like people from north people from the south hate each other um it's actually very weird so my family is like half from the north half from the south and like when my mom was growing up she like she would like get made fun of for how she like rolled dumplings because people were like oh you roll dumplings like a southerner and she's like it is a whole fucking thing it's like people hate each other yeah i mean how else how would you know those intricacies you know what i mean unless you were from there like had history there.

Yeah, well, I mean, I would say this is the thing that's persisted in the US too. You still run into this stuff. Like there are definitely like Cantonese restaurants where like you probably shouldn't speak Mandarin. They're like, there's like, this is still a thing. It's not really talked about very much because it's like, it's kind of an internal Chinese thing. But, you you know the one place you actually really got to see this you got to see this from the hong kong and during the hong kong protests in both sides because like okay so there there's a strain of the sort of like

like there's a strain of chinese nationalism that's very sort of like it was doing this like really virulent sort of like anti-southern racism from you know you get this from a lot of the chinese nationalists on the ccp side there's another faction of like the hong kong protesters who's like thing was like we're not actually chinese because we're not like the northerners who are communist and like evil which is really funny because yeah like you know like okay the if you if you run through the actual history of communism in china it's like, okay, like, like, one of the largest communist, like, strikes that ever happened was in Hong Kong. Like, sure, fine. But, you know, but obviously, like, I'm simplifying all of this enormously, because it's very complicated.

There's a lot of regional shit that's going on here. Yeah. But so your thesis is that the person that started all of this was like me, like from the South or like, just like, yeah, I mean, that is, that is definite.

Like that is, that is like the, like that is the most Cantonese ass name I've ever heard. Like that guy, that guy, that guy is definitely from Southern China. And yeah, my,

my thesis is specifically, it's this Cantonese guy going, Hey, fuck those Northerners. I hate their, I hate their asses. I hate their food. Their food,

eight shit eating. It makes me sick. But because, because this is the u.s the the subtlety of this gets lost and everyone just runs with it it's like chinese restaurant syndrome even though i but this is i i this is this is my theories this is this is like this is like kind of semi-obscured like chinese like internal grudge making point like like knowing the origin point makes a lot more sense now to be honest like why would this be some random like why would he specify a region like a very specific region that's just i don't know i don't know that that that that's my theory i i could be wrong about this but all it fits with all of the details. Yeah, it checks out.

It checks out, I think. Yeah, so, okay. All right, so this letter happens and there's like a flurry of letters of other people talking about this. And, okay, I want to talk about why this got picked up the way it does. I'm going to read a bit more.

This is still in 68. Yeah, this is still in 68. I'm going to read from... Every single article in this also goes exactly the same way, so I'm going to read from the Men's Health version so you get this section of it before I talk about why it's, I think, not sufficient to capture what was happening. Mosby describes the late

50s as a time of heightened anti-Chinese sentiment. By the 1960s, domestic and international politics had shifted towards a fairly clear anti-communist agenda. In fact, he says, during this time, anti-Chinese sentiments were so widespread and accepted that most Americans didn't consider their apprehension to be racial bias. Now, this is true as far as it goes, but we need to go to ads and we'll come back from ads, I will tell everyone what else was going on during that week. Hell yeah. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill.

Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. Presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

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Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do

things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. All right, and we're back. We're back. We're talking about how this, like, letter to, like, a journal in New England suddenly became an entire, like, national American thing. Okay, so the way this happened is that this got picked up by the news

now there's a huge new york times article about this and that article is published on may 19th 1968 now shereen do you know what else was going on in may of 1968 i've heard a lot of shit went down in the 60s uh yeah so this is this is right this is like smack dab in the middle of may 68 in france this is this is like one week after the night of the barricades um three days before this was published the situationists who are like these this like ultra left student organization who who who at this point are occupying their sorbonne like they have fully taken control of their campus they have run the cops out they have run the administration out um three days before this is published the students at the sorbonne reacting to a factory occupation that they heard about send out this famous communique calling for the occupation of all factories in France.

And like, it fucking happens. Like the workers in France take control of like a huge portion of France's factories. Like the Renault factories are under control of the workers. Like, yeah, but by, by, by this time, like this is happening, right? The, the, the, the police have like, The police are fighting them, but they're losing. Two days before this article is published, the Sorbonne sends this to the Chinese consulate. Quote,

Shake in your boots, bureaucrats. The international power of the workers' councils will soon wipe you out. Humanity won't be happy until the last bureaucrat is hung with the guts of the last capitalist long live the factory occupations long live the great chinese proletarian revolution of 1927 betrayed by the stalinist bureaucrats it goes on and on like wow this is what they're sending to the maoists right right like that that is that is how far left these people are like they they are they are telling the Maoist,

shake in your boots, bureaucrats, the international power of workers' councils will soon wipe you out. Like it is wild in France. That's so intense. Yeah, I mean, the fact that this is happening all during all of that, that's not something, I don't know.

That's not what we want to know. It's really important. I have never read an article that actually puts this together and i just think it's not just that going on right like you know if you look at the situation in france they are a week and a half out from de gaulle who is the president literally fleeing the country because he's so convinced that they're about to lose the country to communism like well and i should say when i say communism by the way uh part of that message to the uh uh to the maoists

is down with the state of revolutionary marxism so like that that these are these people are like these people have are marxists who have gone like so far left they've essentially become anarchists it's it's wild i mean you know and also what's happening like the the prague spring is happening during the middle of this um this is also like this is a month after the holy week uprising in the u.s which is so after mlk was killed there were these like probably the most intense riots the u.s has ever seen like even like even more so than like the ones we saw in 2020 the holy week riot like there were like like there were there were like like thousands of paratroopers were being deployed to like kill rioters yeah like it was fucking nuts yeah like that was that was

probably the closest like some of the closest the u.s has ever had to just like actually having a revolution the government losing control of the entire country and like and while this article is coming out like there are still even in may the the holy week uprisings in april but like even it like even in may there are still people on the streets fighting the cops like while while this article is being written and you know if you look at the there's something about 68 so yeah curse on that entire year i mean it's wild like six may 60 like that that year is just the year like the entire world went through i mean there's like like six may 60 like that that year is just the year like the entire world went through i mean there's like like like they they i can't remember if they actually

successfully overthrew the government they like almost overthrew the government of pakistan like a whole bunch of students get shot in mexico because they're trying to bring down the government like it's everywhere there is all this stuff going on um and you know also the other thing that's happening is we're two years into the culture revolution and it's kind of interesting because by 68 we're kind of into the backlash phase of the culture revolution where most of what's happening is that the sort of various rebel factions that formed in 1967 and 1966 are just getting like slaughtered by the sort of like state factions and it's more it's it's it's the culture revolution it's really complicated but like by by by this point the sort of like state factions. And it's more. It's. It's. It's a cultural revolution. It's really complicated. But like.

By. By. By this point. The sort of like revolution part of it. Has like. Kind of calmed down. And it's more the state. In its sort of new form.

Taking control. But you know. If you're living through this. Right. It looks like the cultural revolution. Happens. In. In.

In. In 66. And then it was 67. And then suddenly. There was a cultural revolution. Happening literally everywhere. And this is the context of the MSG scare kicks off in, right?

It starts in, like, right in the middle of arguably the two most radical months of the entire 20th century. Wow. Yeah, and this is the kind of shit that starts, like, just an absolute mania in the American mind that is powerful enough that like, years later, it's still around?

I mean, it feels like it happening at such like a manic time, like people are probably already like kind of feeling that energy, right? Yeah. It was directed everywhere, even at this article. that energy, right? Yeah. It was directed everywhere, even at this article. Yeah, and I genuinely think if this had happened two months later

or two months earlier, I don't think there would have been like a big scare about it. Like, it might have been a thing that stuck around for a bit, but I think the fact that the New York Times article came out exactly

like in the middle of May 68 and that like the original one comes out like right before the, like the original article that gets sent to the thing comes out like a couple weeks before the holy week uprising i i think it was the fact that it was exactly in this moment where everyone on earth is if you're living through this like this is the capital r revolution like has come and you know and that that shattered everyone's brains like i don't know, like, do people remember what it was like, like when like when like the height of 2020 was happening? Like just how sort of wild like it was just psychologically.

I'm telling you, there was like an energy. Yeah. Yeah. This collective. Yeah. Strange. I mean, like, obviously, it's different than it was in 68. But I really do agree with you.

Like, if it happened in January, I don't think it would be a thing you know yeah yeah and you know i so the the other thing that's interesting about about this whole sort of like chinese restaurant syndrome is that you could actually track its spread like across other countries by sort of like moments of like peak anti-chinese like sentiment and also anti-japanese sentiment to a lesser extent because that that that sort of replaces the anti-chinese stuff by the time you get to the 80s and 90s but well not replaces but it's like it's like the the dominant mode of like we have a person we need to be afraid of in east asia right right right um but there's an interesting okay so if if if you if you look up um like if you're looking for like

medical stuff about chinese restaurant syndrome one of the things you will find is a case report of the Indian Journal of Critical Medical Care from 2017 claiming that they were treating a patient who got Chinese restaurant syndrome and like couldn't speak because the thing in the back of his throat had like inflamed. inflamed and you know and they had this whole thing about like this this is like this is like a serious disorder and they they specifically cited that letter to the editor from 68 wow the power of that yeah thing and you know what okay so if you look what was going on in in india in 2017 and it turns out the thing that's going on is like a giant rise in anti-chinese sentiment culminating in the 2017 indian chinese border incident where do you remember when all those guys were like beating each other to death in the mountains with sticks yeah i i do remember that i've been associated many times in my life and especially post-pandemic my brain is broken but i do vaguely remember that i i had kind of forgotten about it and then and

then i looked at this article on solace in 2017 i was like wait hold on hold on wasn't that wasn't didn't didn't that happen in 2017 and it's funny because like yeah rise attention rise again suddenly uh chinese restaurant center reappears wow it's it's really it's really incredible it's it's yeah it's an incredible set of brain worms um i just i mean this is definitely not on topic i guess but even just seeing like covid being blamed on china like there's always like a like a way for ignorant people just to point the finger at china which is really fucking shitty it's so yeah shitty it's yeah i mean i think it's just sort of like like one of the things you sort of need to have a national project is that in order for you to be

in order for you to be like a nation you have to have a you have to have an other you have to have people who aren't part of the nation right and the u.s does this pretty effectively they have they you know they can have this sort of rotating cast of people who like aren't yeah like from the nation right yeah if you want to stay in there are people that need to stay out yeah sometimes it's with mexico sometimes sometimes you get it with sort of like like internal subversion from like black people or like indigenous people yeah but yeah you know they have this rotating cast china's always one of the ones that come back to because it's just big and there's a lot of them and you know for

whatever reason people are easily feared by it like i think it's just like it's unknown and maybe people don't understand it very well that don't look into it themselves and want to fucking be educated but for whatever reason people fear it so easily and it's so bizarre it's so bizarre yeah it it sucks oh yeah okay so we're i'm gonna do an ad break and then we're gonna talk about more of this stuff because it keeps going welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter nocturnal tales from the, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know it. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature.

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I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. And we're back. All right. So obviously, we're dealing with sort of anti-Chinese sentiment and anti-Japanese sentiments as, you know, anti-Japanese sentiment escalating as the 60s turned into like the 80s and 90s. But there's more going on here. Part of the reason, you know, back like this in theory could have been about like soy sauce, right?

Like there's a lot of things that they could have picked out of that to be the thing everyone's excited about. But they picked MSG. And part of the reason they picked MSG is that this is the period when people start figuring out that food additives exist. And people start to get really touchy about it. And actually, Ralph Nader... I remember that guy.

Yeah. So he's around in the 60s. Because he's old as shit. Yeah. Yeah. So he's around in the sixties. Um, cause he's old as shit. Yeah. Yeah. And he's, you know,

okay. So I, I give, I give him credit for, for like, he has probably saved as many lives as like any other American, single American you can name by being the guy who like lobbied to have seat belts in cars being mandatory.

Right. Yeah. I think that was not before because the u.s is a like truly deranged country yeah he wasn't half bad most of the time yeah you know but come on he's also one of the guys who's like the big pusher for getting the u.s government to study msg and a lot of other food additives in like 1960 in 1969 so you know and like there's a bunch of other food additives that they're studying the health effects of. And on the one hand, like, yeah, it probably is good to study the effects of like food additives. Because like, I don't know, companies do stuff that sucks all the time.

And so it is good to study what's in your food. On the other hand. Okay, this is going to sound really ignorant. So I apologize. good to study was interviewed on the other hand wait okay this is gonna sound really ignorant so i apologize what where again if you already said this where was it found where was msg found is it created in a lab like what's the what is the molecule yeah it but by this point it's basically created in a lab the first time someone was able to distill it was they did this whole distillation process from seaweed oh yes seaweed yeah but but by this point, it's...

No worries. Yeah, no, like, by... I mean, even by, like, the early 1920s, I think, it's mostly being produced artificially, which is why everyone's running out of it. But, like, it is... Easily added to food. Yeah, yeah, and it makes it taste better.

But, like, you know, it is something that, like, you can find it, like, in dashi. Like, you can find it in, like dashi like you can find it in like soup broths and stuff like from seaweed so it's it's not like i mean i didn't know that i've i've known about msg for most of my life and i never like for whatever reason growing up we always associate it with sodium like salt salty yeah well i mean it is right like it is a kind of salt yeah but like i don't know like people people people have this whole thing like oh it's artificial it's like like yeah we

make it artificially but like it's not it's not like it's not a thing that you can get out of plants it's just that we don't do it that way because it's easier yeah i mean the source of it is not artificial but also like you're gonna be a stickler on this one thing when you eat like i don't know so many other and drink so many other things. Like there was cocaine and Coke. Yeah. Like it's just, there's every, every, every, every, every American like in, in 1969 is like by, by their body volume, drinking two pounds of lead a year. So like, it's like, this is the thing you're going to stick on. Yeah. And you know, this is and, you know, this, this, this, this is sort of the problem with, with what Ralph Nader is doing with the sort of like pushing the government investigation

of it. Is that like, you know, like, I, I, I don't know how racist 1969 Ralph Nader was. My, my guess is that I, I, I, I don't think that his big thing was we need to study this because it's the dirty, dirty Chinese like salt or whatever. I, I think, I think he mostly just wanted to, he wanted a thing to study this because it's the dirty, dirty Chinese like salt or whatever. I, I think, I think he mostly just wanted to, he wanted a thing to study food additives.

I could be wrong about that. I don't know. I haven't looked, I've looked into this exactly 0%, but like, you know, the problem is that like once this sort of racial panic is going, like you can't put,

you can't put the sort of cork back in the bottle. Right. And you know, okay. So there've been a bunch of studies about this um and like but you know okay so the the problem with what's happening is that because of the way msg has been sort of racialized like the studies don't matter like it just does not matter what anyone actually sort of writes about it until you get an actual cultural change because the study of science is irrelevant.

They have the study to justify a bunch of things. That's the only study they care about. Yeah, yeah. It's like the fake vaccines cause autism shit. Right. No, they just believe this. They have one paper that's literally a joke. Exactly. That's all they just believe this they have one paper that's literally a joke exactly that's what they claim does it yeah that's like 17 others that disprove it but like

no yeah it was like a million others like that by the way that study i want to point this out the methodology of that study was they asked parents who thought their kids had developed autism because of the vaccine if they thought their kids had developed autism because of the vaccine and then the parents said yes. And that's the study. That's the study? Yeah. That's not a fucking study. It's not.

It's a joke. It's literally a Twitter poll that like got published and then retracted because it was a Twitter poll. Right. Like this, this is the scientific basis of all this bullshit. I guess what qualifies as a fucking study then? You can, you can, I don't know. You can, you can publish fucking anything if you put your mind to it this is this this is what i'm telling all of you like follow your dreams try to get something published they publish this bullshit so like you know i'm gonna i'm gonna do a study yeah well the other thing specifically like there's a real problem here

with like with this is everything with medical studies because like you can have a medical study that you get published with a sample size of one because it's you found a thing in a guy and you're like oh i'm gonna publish this but you like medical studies like oh you couldn't just like you could publish any bullshit and like it sucks but okay so all right like lots of so after this there are lots of studies by lots of people and like mostly what they find is they can't find any... Okay, so there's some, like, initial studies that, like, find some alarming stuff in mice. But the problem with these studies is that what they're doing is... Okay, yeah, it turns out if you take a mouse and you just, like, fill a syringe with MSG and inject them with it, it's bad for them.

Oh, you think so? Yeah, like, oh, shit! Yeah, you would you ejected a mouse with pure salt and bad things happen like yes if if you took a human being and you injected fucking a third of a cup of msg directly into their veins it would probably be bad for them okay you know right um and they found out the conclusion from that was basically like okay if someone ate like a third of a cup of msg raw having not eaten for like 48 hours it would probably do things that are not great for you but can't you say that about a bunch of

other fucking things like i don't know if if you didn't eat for 24 hours and ate a third of a cup of salt like that's probably that's not good for you. Like, don't do that. So like, you know, OK, very, very specific circumstances have to light up for you to have a reaction to MSG. So there's a study from 2000 where they also this is also another empty stomach study, by the way, because they've no one has ever been able to replicate like any of these results with a person eating food that has msg in it they've never been able to do it they've been able to get some results if you have people eat like basically pure msg and have not eaten any food like around it yeah it's like okay that's useless because the the molecule at that point it probably

interacts with other things and that you know what i mean like if it's just by itself it's not the actual i don't know yeah i i'm not very good at chemistry so i'm gonna i'll let the chemistry nerds argue about this i did fail ap chem so same great yeah oof i i luckily only had to take chemistry in so i just didn't take ap chem because i was like i suck i took a chem like my first my freshman year and i was like let's not do this again i can't do this i just i don't take chemistry is the thing i wanted to be a psychiatrist for a really long time but failing ap chemistry and just experiencing chemistry i was like i can't do this yeah it it sucks it's the worst but okay so the reason i was

talking about the like vaccines cause that is like autism shit is that there was another thing with msg where people were claiming that it was causing asthma and it no they had there's they had another like an incredibly elaborate pseudoscience bullshit about like msg like that's so getting absorbed like getting absorbed improperly through fetal membranes that's completely nonsense. What the fuck? Yeah. White people love to say that the diseases they've gotten from the fact that

the air in their house is 97% CO2 by volume and because they've decided to run an entire country by just putting fucking trucking yards everywhere yeah like okay there has to be a finger to point at right like it can't be yeah yeah no it can't be the air quality right you know what i mean like yeah i should point i should make this clear by the way when i when i when i when i say when i say that like autism

is not sorry when i say that asthma specifically is when i talk about the bad air specifically talking about asthma i'm not talking about autism with that that that is not what causes autism or whatever like yeah this is just i got what you mean i got what you mean yeah and it's cool and also fuck autism speaks yes yeah uh but yeah i i i want to put that on the record that's what i mean i'm not i'm not saying that trucks cause autism. They don't. Like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay.

But there's a lot of, like, incredibly weird racial, very dumb, anti-scientific panic about it. It's possible that there exists a group. So, originally, it was about, like, anyone who eats this will have these symptoms, right? And then, over time time the argument got sort of fizzed down to there might be a group of people who in the populate like a small group of people who are like specifically sensitive to it and that's probably plausible like there's some experimental evidence that shows that there could be a group of people for whom they're more sensitive to it than a regular person and i don't know sure people have allergies like whatever yeah exactly like yeah peanuts and soy yeah yeah like it's not like like yeah it's it's not a thing to sort of like yeah i don't know like if you're a person who gets allergy reactions to shit like yeah that's

allergies right but like it's it's not the sort of like i don't know if the the the panic about it is utterly unjustified. There may be a, there may be a group of people who it has some effect on because they're allergic to it or whatever. But yeah, imagine, imagine demonizing peanuts because there's a group of people that can eat peanuts.

You know what I mean? Like that is, that's so that's why, like, why would you ever do that? To be fair? I, I,

I, I am okay with demonizing peanuts specifically specifically if it gets people to stop fucking uh worshipping that bastard jimmy carter who was a neoliberal ghoul and his reputation has been fucking uh just like like his reputation has been saved entirely by the fact that every single person who came after him was an utterly deranged war criminal and his war crime was like suppressing well he was a peanut farmer oh sorry yeah sorry this is this is this is this is the uh this is this is the the the deep the the deep jimmy carter lore yes yes for the real jimmy heads out there okay got it yeah okay but you. So going back, I think, so this was the kind of thing that like, you know, people avoiding

MSG is just kind of, had just kind of been like, like a part of daily life. Like it was just like a thing that existed in the world, but it wasn't like at a certain point, it became the kind of thing that people would talk about, like in conversation and like they'll, they, you know, you could just get people to do anti-MSG rants, but it wasn't really a sort of like mainstream political issue in the way that it had been like in like 1969 where there's well the other thing that happened is in the 90s the fda did a study about it the fda was like it's fine like don't don't don't eat 300 grams of it at one time like as long as you're not sitting there like eating msg raw out of the

fucking like they would say the same thing about like high fructose corn syrup you know why yeah and like like by by volume high fructose corn syrup has killed way more people than exactly also now now there's like a whole thing about like msg causing obesity which i i don't know if that's true or not i think their studies are fucking whack but you know it's it's it might cause obesity like every other food that the u.s has made in the last 20 years exactly yeah yeah and one one one day we will do a a episode about like the politics of anti-fatness because it's fucked but yes today we're doing this episode and okay so you know every once in a while the way the way this stuff sort of work

every once in a while there would be a sort of like like a mainstream like asian-american figure who would talk about it so for example there's there's there's a korean chef named david chang who talks about it um and he he did some like he gave speeches about it and the sort of demonization of it but it didn't really get back to mainstream discourse until 2020 when our good friends aji nomoto the people who made the stuff in the first place uh hired a bunch of asian american like celebrities to do a pro msg campaign so they hired eddie huang who's like a writer and chef who's like probably most famous for the being the guy who wrote fresh off the boat and so that they have this whole sort of campaign and this like takes off right like he he this is this is one of those things that was like

completely forgotten that happened in 2020 that no one now remembers because this happens like before covid like before we had the lockdowns and before. I mean, I'll be honest. I it escapes my memory. Oh, I have no memory of this happening either, but apparently it did. I don't know. I was I think this was still while the I think this is while the election was still going on. So yeah, I paid no attention to this time to

do that. Yeah. 2020 the year everything happens. Yeah. But OK, so, you know, this campaign like takes off like like Eddie Huang huang's on on nbc and did you like the talk show circuit with jenny amai advocating for like so their whole thing is that they wanted to remove chinese restaurant syndrome from the dictionary and they had this whole like hashtag redefine crs is like the redefined chinese restaurant restaurant syndrome and this is like a whole thing.

And, you know, and there's, there's something, okay. But this was one of the things that sort of drew me to the story, because if you look at the press for this, right,

it's like activists pressure, Marian Webster. And like, that's kind of true. Like it superficially, it is kind of what happened. And like, yeah,

I'm glad the dictionary changed the entry to say like, this is like outdated and kind of bullshit, but like, okay. Think about what actually happened here, right? A company that makes a product hired a bunch of, a bunch of sort of Asian American, like big celebrity people to do a marketing campaign for them in the name of anti-racism which like yes i i i am glad we are addressing the racism around msg however comma i feel like it's a really sort of like it's a really literal example of the kind of like

pittity and listlessness of like asian american identity and culture and politics like pre-covid like this is this is this is this has something like early january right so covid is still sort the pity and listlessness of like Asian American identity and culture and politics, like pre COVID, like this, this is, this is, this has something like early January. Right. So COVID is still sort of like some disease in China. Like we haven't hit full racism yet.

And again, like this is not like an activist campaign, you know what I mean? Like activists get on board with it, I guess, but like activism is doing an ad campaign for a company that makes salt. Right. Yeah.

It's not exactly grassroots. Yeah. And, you know, okay. And it works, right? Like this is a thing that like the Asian American community like picks up, right? I mean, sort of. I don't know. I don't remember it.

But looking back on the articles and hashtags and stuff, it's like, wow, they got lots of tweets. But, you know, I think the reason that this worked is because of the sort of self-conception of Asian-American-ness as this backstory of immigrants stepping off the boat. And they start a restaurant, and then your kids get an education so they enter the professional class and like there isn't like i don't know like this is in fact this is literally like part of the reason i was doing this also was like this is literally what happened to my family like they like they showed up from taiwan they worked in a restaurant then they opened a restaurant and then like i don't know like every successive generation well okay i was gonna say every every successive generation got more like professionally but like i have a bunch of

doctors but but then they also produce me who's a podcaster so i'm defying asian america stereotypes by being uh more dipshit than my parents um but you know like this has become like this single sort of cultural narrative of like what it is to be an Asian American, right? Like you see this in every single story that Asian American media like has produced in the last like 10 years. It has one plot, right?

There's a family in the U S they're trying to fit in. They almost always have some kind of small business. And then something appears that challenges their ability to like assimilate into American society. This is, and then, you know, they deal with it and that's the end, right? This is the plot of Crazy Rich Asians. It's the plot of Everything Everywhere All at Once. It's the plot of Fresh Off the Boat. It's the plot

of the fucking CW Kung Fu show. It is the plot, like, literally everything that we produce has one plot and it's this. And the reason why is it's, you know, the reason why this is the only sort of like piece of media that that the sort of asian american cultural class has been able to produce this is

the reason why all the fucking activism and ad campaigns are just like fucking we got hired by a company and we're going to talk about where racism racism is bad so that this company can sell more product like the reason it's this is because this is an incredibly marketable self-conception of asian american-ness like the conception of it as being restaurant owners right is there because it's it's a form of culture that can be sold to white people right yeah it's hey look we're different we eat wacky food but you can eat it too and ultimately we're all in this for capitalism in the patriarchal family like just like you are don't worry it's going to be fine and you know that that really depresses me because this this is a moment that demands something else and i think that's why kind of like i think that's why the sort of mainstream like

asian american reaction to like you know like there was there was another there was another asian woman like who got stabbed to death like two weeks ago and there was like fucking no coverage of it like nobody gave a shit it's just gotten to the point where like this happens like six people report on it and then everyone just sort of moves on to their life yeah and I think the reason why the sort of like stop Asian hate shit has gotten to you know like it's gotten it gets gone through the sign cycle where everyone like had the signs up and then they took them down. Right.

And so, you know, like, and I think the reason why it was, it turned into this sort of like, like the, the organizing journey, there's like incredibly vapid,

like put a sign in your store, like Twitter, hashtag stuff like is because of this is, is because what, like what, what it means to be sort of Asian American has been hollowed out and hauled out and hauled out and sold and sold and sold for just decades and decades and decades and now you know like in in a time when it's actually sort of like you know when it when it's really in danger and it's called to action it hasn't been able to

do much right and well yeah pointing out the film and tv thing is really important because i mean so many marginalized communities have this experience but i think china like asian culture in particular i think it really people if they're ignorant and they just see what's depicted on media they don't see them as three-dimensional beings you know what i mean what they have is like a very hollow version of a human and so i don't know it's it kind of upsets me because i feel like media is the first thing people learn things from whether it's film or tv or whatever but yeah well and also i i think it's part of the reason why like the the the way that those those depictions sort of obscure class where you know because in

these things right like a lot of these families are poor but they're still business owners right right and that that's like like if if you're a poor american as well it's because you're a business owner you're like a sort of struggling like american entrepreneur and this obscures the fact that there is a massive asian american just underclass people who are like or delivery drivers or work in warehouses or you know i mean like there are groups people who like come to the u.s and china who you know like live in like basically completely isolated communities in parts of chinatown where they're only speaking chinese and they just fucking like they're the people who have to do a bunch of like warehouse shit and then they leave and that's it right like and these these people this shit never you like you never

actually get any kind of sort of class analysis because the the way that media thinks about asian americans is like there's one of they're either one of three things they're a business owner they're like a rich professional so they're like a doctor or something or they're like the fucking people on bling where they're just like super rich assholes right and that that allows i think like a specific kind of anti-asian politics to work that like asian people are seeing this sort of like perpetual like foreign elite and it's like no i don't know like it's just not you know it's not true and and it means that when you get like asian american political movements like the sort of anti-asian hate thing right like you have like the guy who founded doordash right is like is is an asian is like a chinese american guy right he's like he used to he's a tech

billionaire he used to be like an email like you know you would have these stop asian hate events like this fucking guy is is on there like is up on the stage talking about anti-asian hate and it's like okay this guy this guy has, like, brutally and horribly exploited, like, literally millions of Asian Americans, but, you know, there's no there's never going to be a reckoning with that, because, you know. He's successful,

and he's capitalist, like, he's achieved the capitalist dream, or whatever the shit, you know? Yep, and because Asian American identity has been flattened in this way, like those people are just completely invisible and it sucks and I hate it. And yeah. Yeah.

I, it's just, I don't know. There's nothing good. I can like anything I can say to make anything better, but I think it's just, I don't know. Maybe we can do an episode one day about like film and and tv and stuff because i think it really starts there unfortunately like

like it's it's silly but people that don't know a chinese person will see a chinese person on their tv and be like x like that's the only chinese person i've ever seen in my life and i'm gonna make assumptions about the whole race now. But one, one, one day I'm going to do an episode. We're going to do an episode. That's entirely me shitting on Jackie Chan.

People are going to get really mad at me, but fuck that guy. That's a hot take. He started his career as a fucking scab. That was literally his first thing was he was a scab and he's, yeah, he's a fucking homophobic piece of shit. Fuck him. Uh, yeah. Done. You're a parable damage. I'm down for this episode. Let's do it. Yeah. All right. thing was he was a scab and he's yeah he's a fucking homophobic piece of shit fuck him uh

yeah done irreparable damage i'm down for this episode let's do it yeah all right that will be a we are we are now just part of the episode where we are teasing you with subsequent episodes yes but yeah but yeah i i don't know it is a little bit upsetting how these really important movements are just like they plateau and they become become this vapid thing like you're saying. I think that gives people such an easy out of quote-unquote being an ally or supporting because they think they're doing something by holding up a sign or something without really internalizing or spreading the awareness that is necessary. And I don't know. I guess the thing I want to end on also is me being pissed off at a bunch of Asian American kids in the sixties.

So one of the stories you will hear a lot, if you're studying Asian American politics is like, like is the story that like the term Asian American was invented by these like activists who actually were like doing a bunch of stuff in 1968 um who were these like student act like these radical student activists and like that's true but the thing you have to understand about those people is that all of those people were like like all those people were basically like were third worldists and part of the reason this whole politics collapses well a part of the reason part of what happened was like part of the demands of these students in 1968 of these sort of like

radical student groups like you know they're formed to sort of like support the sort of like black radical student groups and to like advocate for themselves but like one of their big demands was they wanted cultural studies departments in in american universities and they got them but you know okay so what what what are those cultural studies like departments they basically just became these giant traps for radicals where instead of like overthrowing the government you like come do this cushy job in academia and like all of all of the sort of like old radicals like from that era either like got regular jobs or became like i became academics right and the other thing that happened with this

politics that was the reason why it was completely and the other thing that happened with this politics was the reason why it was completely unsustainable was that and this this is this has been a sort of a problem with the asian american identity right is that okay like what the fuck is an asian american right it's like anyone from like i don't know like it's anyone from like the like the edge of the pacific to like i don't know like how how far how far like i i what's it called like how far how far west does that go the other direction like who knows it's like how big is the swath of yeah like i mean this is like billions and billions and billions of people with completely unrelated cultures and languages and stuff like that and the reason they were able to do this was because they were mirroring

their movement off of the third world. But the problem that they ran into, and this was the problem with all the third world movements, was that the third world movement as a thing was based on a bunch of different nationalist movements. It was based on that there was

going to be this alliance between the rising socialist powers in africa and the rising socialist powers in uh uh in east asia and they were going to sort of like ally with like the rising sort of like might not like the the rising sort of like minorities gaining power in the u.s but okay if you look at those nationalisms right you have chinese nationalism cambodian nationalism and vietnamese nationalism all colliding with each other and you know if it turns out like what okay so what what what happens if your movement is based on sort of like the unity of a bunch of nationalist movements and they go to war with each other and you know what happened was when when when china when vietnam

invades cambodia in and and vietnam invades cambodia and then china invades vietnam in 1979 right that entire politics is fucked because what what are you supposed to do like what's whose whose side are you supposed to take here right like you you can do the you know like if if you're gonna be like a marxist like a marxist leninist like the probably the correct line to support vietnam right right but that's a mess because you know how many people are maoists right and if you but you know if you're a maoist and your fucking people just invaded vietnam like you know what are you supposed to do right and there was there were earlier tensions with this too where like like china with china was backing like a really shitty faction in angola who ended up being backed by the u.s and like south africa and that caused a

whole bunch of tensions between the sort of Chinese Maoists and a bunch of the sort of black radical groups because they were like why the fuck are you guys backing these people in Angola but you know and this whole thing became a problem because all of these nationalisms are competing nationalisms right there was never going to be one unified third

world it was always going to end with a bunch of nationalists fucking fighting each other and when that happens the Asian like the Asian American movement such as it was always it was always going to end with a bunch of nationalists fucking fighting each other and when that happens the asian like the asian american movement such as it was just fucking died and you know as a radical movement it was just over and so you know i i think i think the the the lesson that i would take out of this is just that like do not build do not build your movement based off of someone else's nationalism because those people are going to do things because they're nationalists that are just fucked.

They're going to invade Vietnam. The Cambodians are going to invade Vietnam. Vietnam is going to arguably justifiably because they've been getting attacked because they're fighting the Khmer Rouge. These people are all going to go to war with each other. Right. Like you're or you know, you're going to be stuck in the situation where like you're being forced to choose sides between like the Derg and like the Marxist government in Somalia because they've they've randomly gone to war with each other.

So don't do this. This has been my rant that I wanted i wanted to do about this because yeah no i'm glad you did i'm glad that i was here for it too because i don't know it's good to know this this stuff and i get to learn by listening to you tell me um and yeah i i appreciate all the research that you did. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, so I guess this has been,

it can happen here. Yeah. Yeah. That's the episode. You can find us, uh, happen here, pod,

um, uh, Twitter and Instagram. I'm at it, me, CHR three. Um, yeah.

Yeah. I'm at Shiro hero, six, six, six on Twitter. And then on Instagram, just take out the 666s. But maybe I should add them because who cares?

Anyway, thanks. Bye. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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