Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Monosodium glutamate (MSG)

Episode Date: May 31, 2021

Alex Schmidt is joined by writers/podcasters David Roth (Defector, ‘The Distraction’ podcast) and Andrew Ti (‘Yo, Is This Racist?’, Sub-Optimal Pods) for a look at why monosodium glutamate (aka MSG) is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

Hey folks, this is episode number 45 of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating 4-5. I'm doing a membership drive for the run-up to episode 50 of this show, and you are hearing a message about that membership drive because you're listening to the free public feed for the show. I want as many people as possible to be able to hear this show. That's why there's a free public feed for it. I also depend on the support of people who are able to support it's why there's a free public feed for it. I also depend on the support of people who are able to support it because there's a ton of research and editing and labor going into

making this show. I know you can hear that in the episodes, but I feel like I should say so too. I'm also feeling confident about this membership drive. This May has been the best month ever for the growth of the show, and that's really heartening to me. It makes me feel glad about how people feel about this podcast. And if this membership drive keeps going the way I hope it goes, you know, with help from people like you, we can get to the digital art for all 50 episodes of the show, and then maybe even do posters of it from there. The full details are at sifpod.fun.

Thanks for listening to that plug. Now please enjoy listening to this whole new episode. And by the way, it's a patron chosen topic. MSG, known for being in food, famous for being spooky sounding. Nobody thinks much about it. So let's have some fun. Let's find out why MSG is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. I have two fantastic guests today, both returning to this show. David Roth is a writer and co-owner at the incredible sports politics, life and more website defector.com. He is also the co-host along with Drew McGarry of

the distraction, which is the podcast for defector.com. And you heard Dave on the mustard episode of this show. I am so glad he is back for a whole nother food substance. And then my other guest is Andrew T who you heard on the my other guest is Andrew T, who you heard on the very first episode of this podcast, who you've heard on many episodes of this podcast. And I recommend that you go to suboptimalpods.com because you can hear him and his Yo Is This Racist co-host Tawny Newsome and many other people doing amazing audio there. I especially enjoy Yo! Can We Live?, which is a very upbeat spinoff of the Yo! Is This Racist? show that is just as fun and just as amazing. I am so glad Dave and Andrew are here. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and used

internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Catawba, Eno, and Chicory peoples. Acknowledge Dave recorded this on the traditional land of the Lenape people. Acknowledge Andrew recorded this on the traditional land of the Gabrielino-Wartongva and Keech and Chumash peoples. And acknowledge that in all of our locations, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode. And today's episode is about monosodium glutamate, also known as MSG. It's the top patron pick for the month of May. Thank you to Steve Thomas for that excellent suggestion. And thank you to everybody who voted for this, because this is an amazing story and an amazing concept that needs to be illuminated and shared and understood.

So I'm really glad you pushed for that and got us here. This is the kind of topic I thought I kind of understood. And it turns out there is an entire history and and food chemistry and so many other things to it that go even deeper. It's the kind of thing where maybe you know one story and there are so many more stories beyond that. And also perhaps some myths to bust, which we will. So please sit back or sprinkle some Ajinomoto on your food from that cute little Aji Panda shaped shaker that you have. Very good job getting that. I want one of those. Either way,

here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with David Roth and Andrew T. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Dave, Andrew, thank you both so much for coming coming back and of course i always start by asking guests their relationship to the topic or opinion of it and the topic is monosodium glutamate aka msg

and maybe andrew do you want to go first because we we you and i have talked a bit about this in the oh yeah yeah i'm like both the run-up so i'm chinese i think that's probably very relevant um yeah and uh so but also i like i have like kind of like right-ish wing parents who like buy into most of the bad parts of white culture not all of them i suppose but um anyway uh they are also people that are like oh msg gives me headaches of chinese food like it's really it's really uh pretty weird yeah they if you saw a transcript of them having just eaten they do have enough accents you couldn't merely hear them but if you had a transcript of their words immediately after eating american chinese food indistinguishable from your average white bigot it's incredible like they're doing like 80s stand-up comic routines yeah oh i could

be hungry in an hour it's like incredible good for them it's really weird it's really weird what they've internalized but yeah so that is that is uh my relationship with it is we never like used it in the house except we did because my mom was like you know everything was like with the dried mushrooms i guess that's not maybe msg proper maybe it is i don't know but yeah so that's that's uh my relationship is like because also i'm like born and raised in michigan so like yeah i didn't have a moderating sensible chinese influence until i was like in college i would say probably maybe even after definitely in la so like potentially a long time so my relationship to msg is closer to like, again, your average white person, your average unthinking white persons, then I probably should be admitting. That's interesting. And, and also, and I, in the round to this was also like, I'm sorry,

if this is more of the laborious part of your great podcast, yo, is this racist? Because the anti-Asian racism element will come up. And, uh, yeah. So thank you again for doing that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's And yeah. So thank you again for doing this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's all right. What are you going to do? Yeah, no doubt. Now thinking about like what it would be like if my equally kind of like slightly reactionary,

aesthetically Jewish parents were just sort of like, yeah, you pastrami and we're going to be sweating for two weeks. We're thirsty. Right? Come on. Those guys. And they love money too. Like just that kind of incredible reclaiming the hack comedy done about your culture.

It's very weird. Yeah. I don't know what's wrong with my parents, really. I mean, that's largely what I'm on Earth to figure out, this is what I've been doing in therapy for 20 years. It's like, I already, I pretty much have my own shit. Like, I know what it is. I can't fix it. I'm mostly just like wondering what my mom's on about. Yeah. Yeah. We're in the same boat. We're largely in the same boat.

Yeah. My experience of MSG is related to my family, just in the sense that we would every, again, while we're doing stereotypical bits, every Friday night in my youth, we would go to the cafe Chinese restaurant in Waldwick, New Jersey. And it was very like, you know, down the middle American style Chinese food that, like, I remember as a kid, it becoming an issue that, or not an issue, but like becoming aware that there was MSG in it, because they started saying like like marking stuff on the menu and then saying we don't use msg and i couldn't really detect the difference because i had like a child's palette and also because like my parents did all the ordering so we just ate the same things every week

like there was no drop off in the quality of mugugai pan i never liked it and they would never stop ordering it and that was just how that was but i remember like asking them about it i was like should like should i be worried about this because like why are they like making a big deal out of it and i think they were kind of trying to have like both sides the issue to a certain extent where they were like it's real like it's a thing that gets put into food and often they don't tell you and that sounds bad but also it doesn't do anything and it makes everything taste better and so like i was sort of confounded by what this like this thing that is good and seemingly also kind of like a bit of a cheat code at least as my parents spun it to me but that it was also something that i needed to like worry about ask about know about

and be faintly wary of and it was the first of like many extremely like, like those sorts of conundrums that my parents would bring up, you know, about like, like, why am I supposed to believe this political thing? And they'd be like, don't worry about it. Like, just believe it. It's so much easier if you just do that. Actually, speaking of the Metro New York area, one, one thing that I'd heard, um, it was a friend of a friend in college who was like a Chinese kid from Chinatown and was saying in his parents,

Chinese restaurant, at least that no MSG sign stood for, this is not Madison square garden. And we of course use MSG. So like if asked, I'd be like, yeah, we use monosodium glutamate but this side means we're not at madison square garden yes i remember so later in life too i remember having like chef friends rave about msg like it's come around at this point like i remember getting uh cheese curds at a dairy queen in minnesota once and everybody's sort of raving about how good they were like four of us in a car all of us eating it like i can't imagine what the smell was like also we were all hungover like so just it's

bad like sensory overload to the max and my friend who's a chef in philadelphia was like it's all msg that's why they taste good and it was like you know you wouldn't think that you'd need to add anything to like fried cheese nubs but like i like ever since he said that i was like yeah so it made like one of the best food experiences that i ever had somehow uh like 20 better in the estimate of a guy that knows what he's doing so like yeah it's my friend now but also why it's like why wouldn't you add it i feel like yeah it's exactly it just simply makes it taste more more good yeah i that is awesome and i oh for one thing I don't think I told you guys in the run up that the entire bonus shows about Madison Square Garden. It's gonna be great. That'll be great.

That's the other use of the acronym. But, but as far as monosodium glutamate goes, I didn't really have access to Chinese food growing up, partly because I was a super picky kid. And so just any foods that touched each other, I was weird about and I was very difficult to deal with. But I think I had it for the first time in college and had already heard the good stuff about MSG. So I completely missed the panic that swept the United States for a couple decades. So I'm kind of looking for ever since you said that this is what we're going to be talking

about. I've been like kind of fighting the urge to read more about it because I know, you know, from the last time I did this, I learned a lot about mustard, you know, like you're going to teach me. But it's also the idea of like, like, it really did feel like a panic at the time, but I was too little to really understand what it was. And I had also been like, like I said, like sort of caution not to worry about it too much. Yeah.

But like, I'm really curious how it was that people got so upset about this thing. Yeah, let's get into that. That's the thing. As the bridge into it, we'll start with our first fascinating thing about the topic, which is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that is in a segment called Whatcha Gonna Do When You Get Information? I'm Gonna Quote Some Stats. What do you consider stats? Stats. Factual stats. That name was so unpaid to make you do that, right?

Yes. Yeah, that name was submitted by Lowell blickery thank you lowell we have a new name every week for this segment please make them as silly and wacky as possible submit to sifpod on twitter or to sifpod at gmail.com i don't think i did it very good but that's to the tune of genius of love by tom tom club that's what's going on it's pretty good yeah i think you forget how affectless the original performance is yeah it's pretty pretty pretty flat you might have brought more energy to it just because you weren't on like whatever uh like chris harrison green quaaludes were involved next time i'll do that i'll commit then then we're there yep for our next episode about quaaludes yeah everyone is going to take quaaludes i do think

quaaludes quaaludes is up there on what are what are they yeah oh yeah i mean they always sounded tight but it was the sort of thing where like i associate them with like like the colonel from boogie nights seems like a guy that would have quite a bit. That's not like a cool thing to be associated with necessarily. And there's just two stats and numbers before the takeaways this week because we get straight into the roots of the supposed panic. The first number is 1968. of this supposed panic. The first number is 1968. And the year 1968 is when the New England Journal of Medicine, which is a very real, very substantial medical journal, they published a letter with the title Chinese Restaurant Syndrome. And we'll talk a lot more as the show goes on about what that

letter is and where it comes from. But the main source here is a book called Eight Flavors, The Untold Story of American Cuisine by food writer Sarah Lohman, who also came up on the vanilla episode if people heard that. The author of the letter was Dr. Robert Ho-Man Kwok of the National Biomedical Research Foundation. And he said that for several years since I have been in this country, I have experienced a strange syndrome whenever I've eaten out at a Chinese restaurant, especially one that served northern Chinese food. And he proceeds to list several symptoms, including numbness in his body, burning sensation on his skin, headache, and chest pain. And the letter, surprisingly, he guesses like five different reasons this could be. He says, maybe I'm allergic to soy sauce,

maybe it's too much cooking wine in the food, and on and on. And then one of the guesses in the middle there is Chinese restaurants use monosodium glutamate as a seasoning. And this is the spark of Americans being concerned about it. It is wild to me that there is a letters section of the New England Journal of Medicine. And that, yes, I presume, is where the asterisk of as print, you know, like found in the New England Journal of Medicine or published in could rest. Big time. Not published as a paper. If I'm remembering it correctly, that's something to do with like the way that OxyContin was able to market its like the time release stuff. All the scam that basically made it possible for them to immiserate millions of americans was like it wasn't a study

in the new england journal of medicine but it was like one of those like also receiving votes front of the book tidbits like the whole letter or like a study about a study or whatever it was like mentioned in a footnote yeah they really should man vet that any doctor just popping off about being like sometimes if i eat something with too much pepper in it, I get a tingle on my lips. It really also like does doubly highlight that like a medical journal is research or at least studies within a medical journals are research conducted by people who are physicians, but are also scientists. And doctors are not scientists necessarily they don't have to be ben carson was a doctor you know like any doctors are technicians that use techniques derived from science but they are not scientists and you do not need to i had a nurse practitioner

tell me about chemtrails like a couple years ago it was wild yeah yeah now i want to see all the the unpublished letters of dr ben carson to the new england journal and yes just i did not know fundamentally that journals could have these letters sections it really bugs me like like i i guess maybe it helps if you're a doctor to write one of these. But like, I have an undergraduate degree in history. Can I just write to historical journals and pop off of that stuff now? Is that a thing I could do?

I don't know. This is like getting your letter published in an issue of like X-Men. Like this is an issue that it's like it could happen. Like it's just a letter? Give me me a break i don't think they should have a forum section either i think it's weird right everybody talking about sexual experiences in there this is a journal for scientists uh depends on what kind of internist at a small midwestern hospital i certainly never thought i'd be writing to the forum section of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

So you're telling this joke. I probably, off of Pet House Forum, did not know what the word forum meant until way too late. Truly way too late. Damn, can you say that? Yeah. All the damage that section did to

people's brains took a pretty popular word and made it seem really dirty. Yeah. I don't know when, but way too late. Like every game the Lakers play and you're like, it's disgusting. Damn. This is not what I thought. Yeah, right.

This is not what I thought. Yeah, right. Well, we'll talk more about that letter later. But the one other number here is 500 milligrams, which is half a gram, 500 milligrams. And that is the FDA estimate for an average American's daily consumption of additive MSG. And that brings us straight into takeaway number one for the show out of three takeaway number one you probably consume msg or the equivalent of it most days so this is one of many reasons folks do not need to panic about msg like if you're if you're an american or someone in most other countries you're kind of eating it all the time and you were not aware of it.

Yeah. Is it in like snack foods and stuff? Like how am I getting my MSG every day? You're kind of getting it no matter what your diet is, is the other amazing part. Okay. To lay down the basics of it, MSG is an acronym. It stands for Mato Sodium Glutamate. And the food writer Helen Rosner wrote an amazing piece about it for

The New Yorker in 2018. And she has a really good description of this compound. It's quote, monosodium glutamate is a compound molecule. Glutamate, the amino acid responsible for the mysterious deepening of flavor, is stabilized by sodium, becoming something flaky and sprinkleable like a fine pearlescent salt, end quote. So it's really just, it's an amino acid plus a salt. It's added to foods and it's also naturally in a bunch of foods. You can't live like an MSG-free life in any ways I can discover or think of with the research. It's coming your way.

Right. It's like tomatoes and Doritos. More or less, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's in everything yeah that makes a lot of sense it's just also that makes it weirder that people wherever i mean i guess it's just like whatever if you knew everything about everything that was happening right around you and to you every day you'd be like julianne warren safe or whatever and just like living in igloo picking at your own face and uh being terrified so like yeah this makes some great movie though we love it uh but it is like i guess maybe uh

one of those the less you know type of scenarios yeah i mean shout out to julianne obviously it's like but uh but otherwise yeah i'll love her work yeah but i actually am filling in for todd like alex had already booked todd haynes for this slot but it's right it's like the the like salience of it like like when you don't know that it's in doritos or like every seaweed is packed with it and then you're like oh oh my god they're adding it yeah yeah especially it's I imagine like once you start finding out that it's in all the things you like, like, yeah, that's where you either do the Julianne Moore thing or you're just sort of like, ah,

like a newest understanding of why Doritos have pleased me for my entire life. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think that's it. It's like, oh, I get headaches from when I've tried Chinese food. It's like, well, you don't from Doritos, so it's not the MSG. Like, could not be don't from Doritos. So it's not the MSG. Yeah.

Could not be more straightforward. And yet. Yeah. With this research, I like discovered my childhood connection to MSG, which is, again, an incredibly picky kid. I was to the point where I wouldn't eat pasta with tomato sauce. I wouldn't do that. And so I would eat plain pasta with a bunch of Parmesan cheese dumped on it. And it turns out Parmesan cheese has the most natural glutamate with the most natural chemical MSG of basically any food that is not put together by man.

It's loaded. So I was just like piling MSG on the pasta. And that was my food as a child. I mean, you could do a lot worse like honestly like as far as that goes but it's pretty good that makes sense though i guess because like the little it's those like crystals in the long-aged parmigiano-reggiano or like any like cheese that's aged a really long time like it has those like structures in it that are almost like sort of hard and crystalline or whatever the helen rosner always uses good words pearlescent yeah it's like

that's the word for it right yeah that's right she says glutamate also occurs naturally in aged hard cheeses tomatoes mushrooms seaweeds fishes fish sauces and also a lot of savory condiments like marmite and worcestershire sauce yeah it's all over that's what ketchup is too ketchup is basically Americans putting on a lot of ms. I was also way into that. That's that taste. Yeah. That's that taste that you love. The other amazing thing about the glutamate part, the G in it, Sarah Lohman says, quote, glutamate is unbounded glutamic acid, which is one of 20 amino acids on the planet that make up all proteins. Glutamic acid and free glutamate are in our bodies. Our muscles are 17% glutamic acid,

end quote. And that's not to say every part of your body is edible or something, but it is like around. It's not a substance that has only been artificially put into one culture's food. That would be bonkers. To trick you as some sort of prank. Yeah. Linda, and so MSG, again, it's naturally in a bunch of stuff. Parmesan cheese, according to The Guardian, has 12 milligrams of glutamate per one gram. And I'm kind of using MSG and glutamate interchangeably, but that's the thing.

It's what it is. Well, I think that's also reasonable because it's like it's sodium and glutamate, and those are the pieces. So if you have sodium in your diet and that doesn't bother you, then allegedly glutamate is the problem. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So you're fine. Sorry.

I did a shruggy face a sarcastic yeah it's not a visual medium but i think it was implied strongly this is zoom zoom is the best i'll do later of me saying shrug and that'll go in that'll fit in thank you uh and so the other thing is a lot of food companies add MSG to your food because I don't know if I've fully laid out that MSG makes things taste more savory. It's a very delicious thing. And so that last step, about 500 milligrams of additive MSG in the American's Daily Diet, that's being added beyond what's already in the tomatoes and the mushrooms and the cheeses and everything else. They've been doing it forever. Sarah Lohman says that the 1970s, because of this 1968 letter, that's when you start to see U.S. Chinese restaurants put

up those no MSG signs. Meanwhile, in 1976 alone, U.S. food makers manufactured 50 million tons of MSG, putting it in everything from Kraft to KFC. Yeah. So everyone in the country ate it all the time. And then one type of restaurant run by one group of people was forced to stop. Again, I will just say, i truly believe they they didn't stop um i i think those are simply lies because it is pretty stark like especially like restaurant american chinese food it does not taste nearly as good without msg oh yeah and it was good i think they're absolutely within their rights to not stop either it's like you just decided to worry about this like out of nowhere

after we'd been doing it for so many like decades like fine like we'll make it so you don't have to worry about it but like yeah we're not gonna make the food worse because you got scared for some yeah well and also there's the difference of like we we don't add like chemically created MSG, but like, again, it is impossible to make human food without, you know, some naturally occurring MSG in it. So like, it's not true that if it's food, it has some MSG in it. So what does that sign mean? And again, we're not, we're not at Madison Square Garden.

call it which is a great trick so in particular if you see hydrolyzed soy protein or also autolyzed yeast that's msg it's just a fun name that they picked and are getting away with what is and it's fine but they're getting away with it most like bouillon cubes are mostly msg yeah that's what that's why it's good when i was a little kid, I used to, like, eat them. Like, not all of them at once, but, like, my parents had them. Just a little lick. A little lick on the bullion cube. Yeah. And my parents didn't...

Oof, yum. They never had snacks in the house, so I was, like, just sort of going through the cupboard being, like, dried pasta, can't do that, too crunchy. Like, let's put this, like, sinister-looking black square in your mouth and see if that's, oh, it's very good. It's really good. I do. I am thirsty. Quite, quite thirsty.

Like I smell strongly of beef bones. Like I can't conceal it in any way. Right. And that's another like common reason people would say oh i think the msg and this food made me feel bad is they just ate something incredibly salty and didn't drink enough water you know like yeah you will feel bad if you do that you'll get a headache or something but especially a lot of these like rude guys will just like have their chinese food and a tumbler of scotch and no water and then they're like why do i feel terrible that's weird like i'm trying to think of how vigorously the doctor that wrote

that letter to the weekend journal of medicine would like decline water if offered to be like no i'm fine just keep the coffee coming i'm busy right i mean there there is probably a world where that phenomenon in the 70s may partially stem from the fact that chinese restaurants like serve tea and sometimes without water yeah i think americans expected a glass of water but like a lot of times you just get tea or sometimes you just get tea and it's like a diuretic on top of modified for the American palate extra salty food would probably make you feel pretty bad. Yeah. I always think about how people in the 70s and 80s especially must have felt miserable all the time.

Yeah. Just in terms of like what the diet was like at that point, like never eating vegetables unless they're like washed in like salty sauces or like just like sort of right or like done up in like whatever that like proto like jurassic vegetarian style where they're like we cooked this spinach for a whole day to show that we loved it but in all those instances it's just like there wasn't like you couldn't get stuff that like was like had vibrant flavor like that was like the most you could get like salts and diuretics and different combinations to make you more dry and and like socially acceptable like casual cocaine all the time yeah yeah just imagine everyone's breath yeah oh that's the thing i've had this with like thinking about the 86 mets a lot like just seeing you know it's an

anniversary season for them. And Keith Hernandez does games for them. And these guys that like only like eight steak drank scotch, did Coke, didn't sleep, and then got to the stadium and we're drinking like coffee that was just ramped with amphetamines. Cause that was normal.

Right. Like how upset your body being it kind of explains why they kept getting in fights with like off-duty cops like every weekend of that season like wherever they were would be like five guys would wind up fighting with cops gotta be boston right gotta do it yeah they just like they thought their body was telling them to drink water and they were like what's that you want me to like punch a police horse all right yeah well that's another like human body thing is that when they so this letter came out in 1968

and and also the writer according to the journal was was someone named Dr. Robert Holman Kwok, who claimed to be an immigrant from East Asia. But also then a few people started to do studies of MSG based on the letter and ran them in a way that the human body doesn't work. The first big study was in 1969. It was a team at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. And they fed massive quantities of pure MSG to a few dozen volunteers on empty stomachs. And also the results aren't even that demonstrative. Like some of them showed symptoms after eating three entire grams, which is six times the average added MSG for an American today. And then others show no symptoms after 20 grams.

So it's not even a result. That is like chucking down a bouillon cube, right? Yeah. That's like, holy shit. You said they gave him as many as 20 grams in that? Yeah, and some other subjects, they gave them 20 grams, and the people were like, yeah, I'm fine. Which is kind of freaky on its own, honestly. You want to ingest 20 grams and the people were like yeah i'm fine so which is kind of freaky on its own honestly

you want to ingest 20 like it's like an iv bag with soy sauce in it just plugged into your arm like how does that even oh my god yeah just kiko mod on this iv bag like i think it's working i think it's doing something it's crazy bonkers studies like this were the first quote unquote evidence that MSG was bad for you beyond the letter. In real life, it's just kind of throughout our natural and processed food and we're okay. It's fine. Yeah. But also it's like, that means what you need to do is give someone that like 20 grams of salt. If you want to control for yeah or whatever like 20 grams of some

other f***** up thing and guess what a bunch of people don't feel great yeah like if the symptoms are like i wish i had had less of that like if that's like the number one most reported symptom then i think what you've learned is that 20 grams of anything with nothing else is gonna kind of bum people out yeah because also this um this guardian article also and it's partly because they're the guardian they found out what the most msg packed manufactured food is and apparently it is marmite so hello the british commonwealth marmite the yeast spread has 17.5 milligrams of glutamate per gram but also the label calls it yeast extract and and also no one's eating marmite with a spoon as far as i know you like spread a little bit on stuff and you don't do a bunch of grams of it in a weird study that wouldn't make sense yeah like as bad as things are in the united kingdom right now i

don't think they've gotten to the straight marmite off a spoon like stage of societal collapse um this is bringing a memory uh of so i did a college semester in beijing and one thing that happened i believe on the first or second meal was uh this is kind of just an interesting confluence of americans and chinese i guess some white i think white kid in my program i assume white kid american anyway um we get to the first chinese restaurant opening night, opening night, you know, first night of the program.

And the kid pours, pours himself a cup of tea and then sees a bowl of crystal, you know, crystalline powder, takes a spoonful of it, puts it in his teeth. So Chinese people don't put sugar in their teeth. And this is not as common,

but it happened in this instance where they do sometimes, I guess, have bowls of MSG on the table. It was like two tablespoons of MSG or no, because it was like Chinese teaspoons. So like probably a heaping teaspoon. It was a lot of MSG and the Chinese people just definitely let them do it. Take a drink before being like, yeah, hot seawater.

That's not, that's not sugar. By the way, it's also gross to put sugar in your tea. Just the Pacific ocean in a glass. Great. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, just truly delightful stuff.

And that's another thing I've learned from the research of this is that it's relatively common in a lot of places to have MSG as a table condiment like that. Like, I guess Helen Rossner got turned on to the main brand of it is called Ajinomoto. And they give you like little shakers of it, almost like a salt shaker if you want to buy it that way. And she says she'll just sprinkle it on foods if she wants to, and many professional cooks do this, and it's super common in Japan in particular. But it's a thing going on. That's cool that you have the experience of it up close,

and also that people dumped it in their tea because of preconceptions. yeah it's not the worst idea in the world it just seems like it's easy to screw up i guess you know like it would not be the first thing i would assume is like these flakes are densely salty yeah it's just uh like helen rosner describes it in particular as like something she uses similarly to a wedge of parmesan or a tube of tomato paste but you if you don't want it cheesier or tomatoier you just make it savory or straight up with an amount of msg and yeah basically if if you come across someone saying i had msg and i had terrible symptoms like check if you feel terrible every day all of the time and if you do then you have analysis to do and maybe it's msg but otherwise it's probably not that it's probably something else i think

genuinely dorito dust probably is the closest to americans just having a table msg loose msg crystals around yeah it'd be so elegant like just little bowl, like people keep kosher salt in or whatever. Just like salt baying that onto whatever you've just cooked for yourself. Off of that, we are going to a short break, followed by a whole new takeaway. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places. Yes, I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening

to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience, one you have no choice but to embrace because yes listening is mandatory the jv club with janet varney is available every thursday on maximum fun or wherever you get your podcasts thank you and remember no running in the halls well from here let's get into takeaway number two for the main show. Takeaway number two. The guy who discovered MSG also got to make a lot of money off of it.

That's always nice. This is it's one of the nicer like industrial stories and food stories have come across. I really like this. Right. And it's in Japan. So often they're just stolen the ideas or. Yeah, that's cool. I guess I assume. Let's hear whether it's cool. I might be wrong. It just seems to be cool. It's really good. And especially coming from this as an American, I sort of primarily associated MSG with China and Chinese food. But MSG was discovered by a Japanese chemist. His name is Kikune Ikeda.

Dr. Ikeda lived 1864 to 1936, mainly worked at what's now the University of Tokyo. And he was the first person to isolate the chemical monosodium glutamate, because again, it's a chemical. And he was also the first person to connect it to food tasting savory and amazing and then he also built an entire business and made a bunch of money just worked out great it's good that there's a fortune that was built off a thing that actually like mostly makes people's lives more enjoyable like i know there's probably other ones like that but so many of them it's like you go far enough back and they're like no this guy this guy invented sadness, actually. And his family's got all these houses now. Like this is kind of a cool break.

Yeah, it's just one of those. Like I was reading about Orville Redenbacher the other day. He just helped make microwave popcorn better. And a bunch of people enjoyed it. Awesome. Really good. Real guy. Yeah.

Can't beat it. Awesome. Really good. Real guy. Yeah. Can't beat it. Well, and so this discovery, and this was an exciting advance in chemistry that happened around the turn of the century. One spark for it was that Dr. Ikeda went to Germany in 1899 to work with chemists there as like a scientific exchange thing. And he found that he struggled with the cultural difference in Germany and he missed home. He also noticed an odd thing where specific foods had an underlying flavor that reminded him of all of Japanese food, but the foods were tomatoes and cheese and a couple other things that aren't obviously linked to what he ate back home. And then the other spark here is

that he's coming from Japan, which has centuries-old traditions of harvesting MSG. It turns out that the coastal waters of northern Japan are full of kelp, like a very large kelp seaweed. It can be grown, harvested, dried, and then cooked into a delicious broth. And Sarah Lohman in her book says that people in Japan have been doing this since at least the 700s AD, and the kelp broth is called kombu dashi. It's the basis for nearly every soup in stock in Japanese cooking, and it's full of MSG. It's great. I was wondering as you were going through it, I was like, oh, that sounds like kombu,

but I'm sure that this is some sort of more sophisticated version of it that I certainly would never have tasted many times. But yeah, that's cool. Yeah, it's just seaweed that is full of this glutamate and the salt because it's very natural. It can be added by an industrial company, but it also is just in the oceans and our plants and everything else. The tomato and cheese thing is interesting too, because I always wondered where if you go to like, I mean, whatever, not every izakaya is going to be like this but the ones that i've been to there's like you know all these delicious japanese you know bar specialties and stuff like that like you know the type of restaurant i'm talking about where it's like you can get fried seafood and a

beer and like sake and like stuff like stuff like that izakaya is like small the small plates right like just a lot of yeah well thanks yeah i think for for most americans it would be japanese but not sushi yes and i guess now and not ramen but like the other type of japanese yeah like yeah like skewers and like things like that yeah and a lot of times those menus will have on them like randomly two pasta dishes like italian style pasta dishes i know that that's like a strange like sort of a fixation in japanese culture but it's i it never made sense to me like first of all who would go there and you could get like all of these different delicious things and you're like no i'd like to get the spaghetti bolognese that you guys have

and like just bring me that but there is i guess it is like a similar flavor profile in some weird way like underlying in terms of like what you're getting from it. Japanese Italian is actually really good. It's just, it's different. It's like a different type. It's the same way Chinese American food is simply a different type of food. Right. It's just different.

Yeah. And that's really cool. I hadn't thought of that connection to it. Because, yeah, it's all, it's the same thing. And that helped Dr. Akeda discover the chemical basis of it which is really exciting to do this he proceeded to return to japan and then did his first experiments with kombu dashi in 1907 he boiled it all the way down until nothing was left but a white powder and then that powder is c5 h9N04, which is MSG. There was just one N because N is sodium, monosodium.

He just figured out the chemistry. And to me, the really exciting part, this is the Guardian talking about it, quote, by the time Dr. Ikeda published his paper, the professor had wisely already patented MSG. the professor had wisely already patented msg he began to market it as a table condiment called a g no moto which means essence of taste that same year end quote just built a business on it it's the best i love it i i do like how chemists in the 1800s is like sort of indistinguishable from any drug dealing idiot that you know like so he freebased the seaweed that's interesting cool i'm glad that worked out for him so we're gonna boil this down and just see what happens yeah i mean i guess it's like that was you gotta you gotta go in

there with the science that you got but there is something funny about the idea because when you were like he invented it like he discovered it and i was like wow this is gonna be good uh and it didn't occur to me that that would just be him being like just keep going keep going till we're done uh like whatever whatever's left when everything else is gone is probably the thing and that's what i'm gonna patent like yeah hats off though i mean obviously it worked out it's just like i was i was expecting like more uh like lightning flashes and things heaving off of a slab or whatever yeah oh yeah the technique is always depressing i mean that that is a thing i guess that's right in the time when chemistry is becoming less it's still basically witchcraft and then yeah we're still in the

witchcraft to lab coats transitional period yep the awkward the awkward adolescent phase yeah scientific discovery we're not actually talking about something different than throwing eye of newt into a cauldron really it's still very much a cauldron based art at that time at the very least well it does and it does the other chemistry thing i'm thinking of is like whenever they figured out that coca-cola was cocaine driven and and maybe make it without it kind of like this is when people are starting to say i love that maybe i should check what's in it and find out why and he he discovered a positive thing like oh this tasty salt is the good thing great wenda and so this guy dr akita he really built the msg industry

and profited from it for one thing he coined the word umami. He took the Japanese words umai, which means delicious, and mi, which means essence, taste, or flavor, and gave a 1912 speech where he said, this is the essential form of savory, just like sugar is the essential form of sweet. It's called umami. He also founded the company Ajinomoto, collaborated with a co-founder named Saburo Suzuki Jr., who had a business that processed seaweed into iodine. So they took the seaweed processing and the MSG knowledge and just started producing industrial MSG. Also figured out how to make it out of molasses and other easier-to-get plants.

Other companies have proceeded to create MSG and do it too. But again, Ikeda died very rich in 1936. Apparently, in Japanese schools, they are taught a list of Japan's 10 greatest inventors. He is on the list. It might be worth saying if you're Japanese listening to this, this is probably all very obvious to you, I guess, because it sounds like he's well known. But Ajinomoto is now the top provider of what's called dry savories in more than 130 countries. And you can visit their headquarters in Japan and there's a whole tour. There's a big double portrait of Akita and Suzuki looking down on you as you do it. I just really like that the guy who figured it out for all of us got to make a ton of money and be super famous because of it it's awesome it's great

also busting out on being a japanese rich japanese man at just about the right time i was gonna say like 36 is absolutely just knowing when to fold them sort of about to be downhill for the rest of your natural life yep might as well this is like really my last chance to have everybody feel good about me forever. Yeah. Because in like in a couple of years, I'm going to have to make a decision that everyone's going to like hate me for one way or another. Yeah.

Someone's going to be mad. Yep. And they're going to be right or very wrong, but then wrong about it. Yeah. That was his rationale. Sure. Yeah.

It was like, I'm sure. Yeah. My last, my last great masterstroke perfect timing all around it's not with him personally but there is one imperialism part of the story at least especially if you're an american which is that uh so he's japanese does this in Japan. And then apparently one of the main reasons China gets into this industrial MSG is that Japan conquered Taiwan and then brought the MSG there. They ruled it from the 1890s until after World War II. And so Taiwan is sort of a crossroads of Chinese food and then American Chinese food receiving this industrial MSG. So imperialism pops up. It's in there. As it would. Yeah. How could it not?

Yep. Well, and there's one more takeaway for the main show. Let's get into it. Takeaway number three. There is something strange going on with that 1968 letter that sparked the United States MSG freakout. And we'll keep this somewhat brief because one of the main sources for this is This American Life, which is another podcast. So I don't want to just do their thing. But it would be weird to not share this story about MSG because it's bonkers. It doesn't make any sense. If you want to do it in an ira glass voice i think you can just feel free to do the whole thing you're allowed it's public radio

that means that anyone can have it you own a part of yeah cadence hey yeah public radio it's mine that's my show now we made it right yeah yeah it's like when you go to a park and you just take a big dump on the lawn and leave because it's like it's your lawn your part right do you do that i don't know if actually if other people do that you know but the point is we have the right yeah right you don't have to it's just it's there it's the option if you want it so what because the letter sounded really bizarre in the first place like what yeah like how how far up does this go like did this doctor exist was my first question when i heard the letter yeah so he he's a real guy we are pretty sure what happened but there's no total way to prove it the background here is again this is Dr. Robert Homan Kwok of the National Biomedical

Research Foundation in Maryland. And it sparks all these studies and so on. But in the chaos of all that, it seems like nobody really contacted him or checked in with him or found out what his deal is. And from here, the story jumps to 2017, 1968 all the way to 2017. At Colgate University in upstate New York, there's a PhD student named Jennifer LeMessurier. She researches Dr. Robert Homan Kwok. And she finds out he was a researcher and a pediatrician in Maryland.

He died in 2014. His obituary is published. Like, this is a person. And he's also a Cantonese immigrant and, you know, real. And then the super, super weird thing is she got a call from someone named Dr. Howard Steele, which also Steele is 96 years old at the time. He tells this student, Jennifer LeMessurier, that he graduated from Colgate in 1942. He is a trustee of the college now. And he says, quote, I have information perhaps you might like to hear. I am the author of Home and Quack. hear i am the author of ho man quack uh and did not expect the uh like last act of inside man twist so it's like christopher plumber in my head now right 96 year old scheming man yeah it's very exciting yeah and so he he gets in touch and And then Jennifer LeMessurier brings in a journalist and they publish this big, long story in the Colgate University School magazine. He claims that what happened is he and a friend had a bet about medical journals having bad standards for for what they accept. And so he told his friend, I'll send them an incredibly obviously fake letter. And if they publish it, I win the bet. And Steele said, quote, I'll make it so obvious they'll know immediately that it's fake.

Whole man quack was a breakdown of a not nice word we used when someone was a jerk. We called them a human crock of you know what. And so he's claiming this is like, and it's a pretty racist pun, but it's like a racist pun version of human crock as an Asian American name or just Asian name. And then Steele also said he made it extra fake by making up a medical facility. Steele said that the National Biomedical Research Foundation of Silver Spring, Maryland doesn't exist And so he was like, that's part of what I made up, isn't that great? So who died in 2000-whatever then? Yeah, and so then Steele dies the next year

And then the year after that, this American Life investigates it And they find out that for one thing, the National Biomedical Research Foundation of Silver Spring, Maryland is real. Like it's a place, there's a building there and everything. It's actually a thing. And then they find out that Dr. Robert Homan Kwok is a real person and really worked at the foundation. And so now it seems like steel is lying. And then they went to Kwok's children and former co-worker and the son of Kwok's boss. Their episode, quote, they all said, yes, Dr. Robert Holman Kwok did write the letter. His daughter said he was proud of it, end quote. So what seems to be the upshot is this random white doctor who went to colgate

just like spun a tall tale in his late 90s in a really really weird and strange way so yeah like what's the point yeah yeah like that's you get one last prank in before you die at the age of 96 like that's bizarre of all the things too like the like i mean especially like it's weird that he would be like i made up this medical institute and the person that's reporting it it's like oh he probably made up the medical institute i guess it's probably made up there's no reason for me to check that or see if it exists or whatever like you could just do a web search by 2017 like just google it yeah it's it's probably some huge building like you can't make that up i think the real story is as we all know doing research oh don't do it let's just

pass up yeah someone told you something just tell everyone else yeah sometimes you might want to print the legend if howard steel calls you and he's like i have information regarding a letter to the national journal of the American Medical Association. And now that I have killed Iron Man, I will... Yeah, right, I was going to say. Divulge. Like, you take the call when someone says, it's Howard Steele, and then the rest of it is like,

so what do you want to talk about? I'm just happy you called Dr. Steele. Right. How's your space laser? I don't know. You see him like the guy who would do that yeah and i also and i think this also plays into like part of the msg freak out was driven by just just people being xenophobic on top of racist rights and nobody bothered to check with the writer of the letter to the point where this old random guy could could pretend it was all a fake thing right it's a really it's layers on layers of people being weird it's tough yeah so the letter's real and msg is probably

fine i think the other weird thing about it is that this guy really really seemed to think he had a bad time with msg that seems to be a real belief of a guy even though it's not accurate a lot of the stuff that he's talking about in terms of like a tingling sensation or like to me that's just like it's szechuan food right like he's describing a reaction to peppercorns was my first thought like yeah which is like yeah like i eat too much of it and like i feel really good and a little euphoric but then i get thirsty and my lips tingle like i know dude like i'm that's like the first thing i'm gonna do when i'm inoculated is like go have that exact experience on purpose i was gonna say or like celiac or something like people with actual gluten allergies yeah you know right but

again it is like right like a lot more foods would would have that thing i know and also if all your terrible symptoms are from just one guy he could be having like a heart attack or you know i don't know it could be a stroke or does anyone else get numbness in their left arm whenever they eat a sandwich just don't any letter that was written to a publication in 1968 just don't read it like whatever you learn from it is probably going to be wrong but also what are you doing new england journal of medicine yeah started this whole thing just because you needed to let this guy pop off. Folks, that is the main episode for this week.

My thanks to David Roth and Andrew T for diving into this topic. Man, there is a lot to it, and it's something that, you know, hopefully people understand better. You know, whether it's from this show or just from generally finding out what's going on, that would be a really good thing. Anyway, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on Patreon.com, patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the strange six different versions of madison square garden

as we said on the main show that building gets called msg also it has a completely bizarre story and origin and everything else and you get to hear about that on the bonus visit sifpod.fun for that bonus show for a library of more than three dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring the original MSG, monosodium glutamate, with us. Here is one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, you probably consume MSG or the equivalent most days. Takeaway number two, the guy who discovered MSG also got to make a lot of money off of that. And takeaway number three, there is something creepy going on with

the 1968 letter that sparked the United States MSG freakout. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guests. They're great. David Roth is a writer and co-owner at Defector.com. He is a co-host of the Distraction Podcast along with Drew McGarry. That whole operation is doing media right and doing a lot of really important things with the issues they cover and the fun they have doing it. So please check it out. And then Andrew T. is also doing media right in his own way. He and his co-host Tawny Newsome make an amazing podcast called Yo, Is This Racist? And then they make a whole bunch of other podcasts and shows at their

network Suboptimal Pods. That's suboptimalpods.com because it's optimal to subscribe to. You get it. Highly, highly recommend everything they're doing there. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. A great article in The New Yorker, it's called An MSG Convert Visits the High Church of Umami, and that is by Helen Rosner. Another great article from The Guardian, it's called If MSG is So Bad for You, Why Doesn't Everyone in Asia have a headache? Which is a really good title. And that is by Alex Renton. And then a great book called Eight Flavors, The Untold Story of American Cuisine by food writer Sarah Lohman came up on The Vanilla Show too.

Just a really enjoyable book on top of being very illuminating. Find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun and beyond all that our theme music is unbroken unshaven by the budos band our show logo is by artist burton durand special thanks to chris souza for audio mastering on this episode and i also want to say a quick thank you here to a bunch of you. Cause not only, you know, you're listening to the podcast. Thank you. But also a lot of you sent very nice comments or messages or replies to social media posts I made recently because I am, and I'm a relatively private person about this stuff. Like I want to share it.

And also it's for me, you know, but, um, me and my partner, Brenda are now engaged. We're engaged to be married is the first thing I'm taping since doing that this like intro outro thing here. And so I'm thrilled about it. And I'm glad for people to know

about it. And and I want to say thank you for the nice replies and notes and everything about that, because it's a it's a great thing. And I'm just really glad. And you know, making a podcast is a relatively personal action, like I share about my life every week, and you know, making a podcast is a relatively personal action. Like I share about my life every week and you participate in that. So I am excited to tell you this good news. It's a good thing going on. And with that, you know, very special note complete. See you next week. More secretly incredibly fascinating coming next week.

So how about that? Talk to you then.