I do my best to give my children pure, healthy food. I use as much organic produce as I can; cook fresh meals every day; check for food additives, palm oil, maltodextrin, artificial flavors, and trans fats on ingredients lists; and know my saturated from my polyunsaturated fats. But there is one ingredient I have been more vigilant about than any other: monosodium glutamate, or MSG. You find MSG in the most abhorrent foodstuffs known to man: ready-made sandwiches, ready-made sauces, supermarket pizza, low-fat this, diet that, and Pringles, whose manufacturer, Procter & Gamble, in 2008 won a petition to have them declassified as potato chips, thus avoiding sales tax, on the grounds that they were almost entirely an industrial product that had virtually nothing to do with potatoes.
In other words, MSG is the neon arrow alerting me to foodstuffs I consider toxic for my kids. If I see it, I don’t buy it. And that goes for autolyzed yeast and hydrolyzed soy protein, which are MSG in disguise.
We have known about the evils of MSG for decades. In 1968, a doctor called Robert Ho Man Kwok wrote to The New England Journal of Medicine to share an observation that Chinese food made his neck go numb, among other troubling symptoms. He coined the term “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome” to describe it and speculated that MSG was the cause. Others soon wrote in to add palpitations and headaches to the list of symptoms, and since then, MSG has been blamed for everything from Alzheimer’s to childhood asthma to attention deficit disorder.
The world’s largest producer of MSG is a Japanese company called Ajinomoto, which makes 2 million tons of the stuff every year and exports it around the world. Ajinomoto—it means, literally, “essence of taste”—was founded by Professor Kikunae Ikeda, who discovered MSG in 1908. He realized that konbu seaweed was a natural source of the particularly delicious amino acid called glutamate and that if he could manufacture it, he would have a powerful flavor enhancer. He patented it in the form of a white crystalline powder, stabilized with salt, the following year. As frozen foods and canning changed the domestic culinary landscape in the decades that followed, MSG played an important role in adding flavor and mouthfeel to processed foods when these were lost during their industrial preservation—which is why it is particularly prevalent in diet foods.
And that’s not all. Back in Paris, Toshi had told me, actually looking over his shoulder to make sure we weren’t overheard as he said it, that a few years ago Ajinomoto had made the hole in the top of the MSG shaker larger so that people would use more. Now if that’s not a scandal right there, I don’t know what is.
As a serious journalist, I could hardly go to Tokyo and not see it as my aim—nay, my duty—to infiltrate Ajinomoto and expose their corporate mendacity. But how could I sneak behind the forbidding walls of their Nihonbashi HQ? What cunning ruse could I employ to gain access to the hidden, high-security world of this sinister, cultlike organization?
I rang their press office and asked if I might pop by and ask them a few questions. They said they would be delighted. When would I like to come? I said: But isn’t it supposed to be harder than this? You mean you’re just inviting me along? They said: Yes, see you tomorrow at eleven o’clock. I said: All right.
I arrived five minutes early—all the better to catch them off guard—and stood taking in the grand marble entrance hall of the Ajinomoto tower. I took a sneak look at some of the company’s products—soups, powdered dashi, pure MSG—while I waited for my contact (although, looking back, maybe it wasn’t such a sneak peek, as they were, like, you know, on display).
My contact turned out to be a friendly young PR lady who welcomed me to the company and showed me to a meeting room on the fifth floor. There, already waiting (damn!), were Shigehiro Yamamoto, the company’s PR associate general manager, and Kumiko Ninomiya, the company’s scientific affairs spokeswoman, smiling and friendly. As if they had done nothing wrong.
I settled into a chair across the table from them, took out my questions, pen, and notebook, and commenced the interview, trying to keep thoughts of the Pulitzer from my mind.
Official Transcript of Interview Recording
MB: [Clearing throat and rustling papers] So, MSG. It’s really bad stuff, isn’t it, or what?
YAMAMOTO: [Laughing politely] No, it is no more processed than sugar or salt. It originally comes from konbu, seaweed. It is just a basic seasoning.
MB: [Pauses, looks down at notes] So what about all these headaches and numbness, then?
YAMAMOTO: That was disproved years ago. Have you never read the essay by the American food writer Jeffrey Steingarten, “If MSG Is So Bad for You, Why Doesn’t Everyone in China Have a Headache?” The World Health Organization, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the United Nations have all concluded that it poses no health risks.
MB: Steingart … erm … it doesn’t say anything about that in my notes. Wait a minute. [More rustling of papers, the sound of a seat squeaking, nervous coughing] OK, but what about umami? You say your product enhances the umami in food, but no one has actually proved that umami exists, have they?
NINOMIYA: Actually, since the Miami research group discovered the umami receptor, in 2000, I don’t think there has been any doubt in the scientific community that it exists and that it is one of the basic tastes. It is not really questioned now that umami has a physiological function.
MB: [Long pause, a deep sigh] But isn’t it true that Ajinomoto wants to conquer the world with MSG? I have evidence that you deliberately made the hole in the top of the dispenser larger so that people would use more of your product. What do you say to that?
YAMAMOTO: [More polite chuckles around the table] We did make the hole larger about thirty years ago, it’s true, but that was simply because when people added MSG to their miso soup, the steam from the soup was clogging up the hole. It is true that MSG is our company’s original product, but we only want to explain more about umami. We don’t want to destroy anyone else’s food culture or get everyone using MSG, but we want to spread the word about Japanese food as a whole. We want people to learn more about how to make Japanese food. We want people to know about dashi, but even in Japan it is difficult for people to make dashi from scratch with seaweed and katsuobushi. Restaurants can do this, but MSG is, in my opinion, a really good product for home use.
MB: Well, if all that is true, how come America has been so hostile to MSG?
YAMAMOTO: Because it is a Japanese discovery, I guess. Perhaps they didn’t want to eat something that looked like a chemical and was made abroad.
MB: That’s as maybe, but no chefs in the West believe in umami, do they? I mean, we’ve managed without it for centuries. It isn’t exactly a hot topic of conversation in Europe and America, is it?
YAMAMOTO: Do you know a chef called Heston Blumenthal of the restaurant the Fat Duck, with three Michelin stars? He wrote to us some years ago, a very simple letter asking for more information about umami and later came to an umami workshop we ran in Kyoto in 2004. He said to me, “My heart belongs to umami.” He uses dashi and konbu in his cooking now, as does Ferran Adrià. Do you know it? Thomas Keller of the French Laundry is coming to our next symposium, too.
So: the truth about MSG.
To set the record straight, MSG does not make mice’s heads explode. Nor is it in any way toxic, at least no more than, say, salt. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has indeed given it the all clear, as have the UN and the European Union. It turns out that the studies carried out in the sixties purporting to show that MSG had adverse side effects had involved giving mice absurd quantities of the stuff, equivalent to an adult eating a pound. So, while even Ajinomoto concedes that some people might have an adverse reaction to MSG, it is no more than are allergic to eggplants, say, or sofas. MSG is merely a man-made glutamic acid produced by fermenting carbohydrates and sugars—nothing more, nothing less.
Now, to umami. Umami and MSG are inextricably linked but are by no means the same thing. Umami is usually referred to as the fifth taste, after salty, sweet, bitter, and sour (although some neuroscientists claim there are fifty or more tastes, but let’s not get into that; it has taken long enough for the Japanese to convince the world that umami exists). When Ikeda identified it in konbu, he wrote: “An attentive taster will find out something common in the complicated taste of asparagus, tomatoes, cheese, and meat, which is quite peculiar and cannot be classed under any of the well-defined four taste qualities, sweet, sour, salty, and bitter.” It is not confined to Japanese foodstuffs. Cheese—parmesan in particular—and tomatoes have a powerful umami flavor, as do air-dried ham, veal stock, and Worcestershire sauce. Mother’s milk is rich in umami (far more than cow’s milk), as is the crust on grilled or fried meat. In fact, it is often easier to describe what umami is by listing the things that are full of umami flavor, as people do tend to tie themselves up in knots on this subject—savory and meaty are the words most frequently employed, but often the Japanese resort to translating it as delicious or tasty.
The other four tastes serve a clear purpose. Salt identifies whether there is salt in a food—obviously; sweet tells you if there is sugar (and that the food is therefore an energy-giver); while bitter and sour are useful as warnings of toxins or unripeness. So why does our body need an umami detector? Because the flavor of umami indicates the presence of glutamates, which indicate protein in food. Protein is essential to our survival, so it makes sense that our tongue has a receptor to identify it in food. Glutamates are one of the key compounds that make food tasty to humans, but unlike salt or sugar, there are no obvious go-to foods to get your hit. The nature of glutamates and umami is that they support other flavors, add body, and enhance them, which is why it has been so difficult to identify. Umami is also an indicator of ripeness and therefore tells us when vegetables and fruits are at their most nutritious—tomatoes are at their most umami-ish when they are at the peak of ripeness, for instance. What MSG does is artificially replicate the naturally occurring flavor of the amino acid glutamate, which makes things taste umami-ish.
Umami has actually been identified in over forty compounds, but it is most strongly present in glutamate and certain ribonucleotides, chief among them inosinate and guanylate. No, me neither. But the most important thing to know as far as Japanese food is concerned is that the Japanese are the world masters at maximizing the umami in their cooking. This is best exemplified by one dish: miso soup. As Professor Ikeda discovered, konbu has more glutamate than any other foodstuff on earth, while katsuobushi, the other main base ingredient of the dashi used to make miso soup (along with water), is one of the richest natural sources of inosinates. Meanwhile, shiitake mushrooms happen to be extremely rich in guanylate and are often added to miso as well. That’s quite an umami triple whammy as it is, but the combination of these three ingredients generates far more umami flavor than the mere sum of their parts. When the glutamate of konbu meets the inosinic acid in katsuobushi and the guanylate of shiitake, the umami profile is multiplied by a factor of eight. Apparently, it drives one’s left lateral orbitofrontal cortex quite batty.
The Italians aren’t too bad at generating this so-called synergistic umami effect either, having long ago figured out—albeit intuitively—that parmesan, which has the second-highest amount of glutamate (1,200 milligrams per 100 grams to konbu’s 2,240 milligrams per 100 grams), and tomatoes pack a tasty punch when combined. The French, too, have been maximizing their umami intake for centuries by reducing veal stock to a meaty, savory, amino acid–packed essence. The British, meanwhile, found their umami in a more prosaic source: Marmite, or yeast extract.
There is also a clear connection between foodstuffs that are fermented or aged in some way and an increase in umami-ness, as these processes tend to break down proteins, turning them into tasty amino acids. Katsuobushi is fermented, for example, as are sake, miso, and soy, and all of them have rich umami flavor profiles. To that list we could add bottarga and other dried or smoked fish roe; the fish sauces of Southeast Asia, which have much in common with the ancient Roman anchovy sauce garum; and, of course, aged cheeses. I would guess that Roquefort and Stilton are mightily glutamate-rich.
And a big fat “So what?” I hear you say. So what if there is a fifth flavor? We’ve been eating it all this time; now we just have a name for it. Big deal. But it is a big deal because, first, if we know what “tasty” is, then we can learn to make things tastier. Heston Blumenthal makes a dish at the Fat Duck called Sound of the Sea—it is the one where diners sit listening to sounds of the ocean on an iPod—with seaweed, edible sand in the form of tapioca, powdered konbu, miso, abalone foam, and wakame stock with oyster juice, along with dashi. Sounds terrific, doesn’t it? And what a combination of umami-rich foods. I bet the synergistic effects are off the scale.
But there could also be significant health benefits to learning how to maximize the umami in your cooking. Umami brings extra depth and savory flavor to dishes, which allows the cook to cut back on salt, fat, and sugar—all the things that are killing us in the West. Umami gives flavor without the calories or other health risks.
It would also appear that the human body has a kind of automatic umami limiter. Once you’ve had enough umami, your appetite slows markedly, so you don’t want to eat so much umami-rich food and favor something blander. The very latest information from the Umami Information Center—which is, admittedly, funded by Ajinomoto and is trying to alert people to what umami is so they can sell them MSG and get it into their food quickly and easily—suggests that there are umami receptors in our stomachs as well as our mouths and that they are important for the digestion of proteins. In other words, we also taste with our digestive tracts. Apparently, these receptors, upon getting wind of some glutamates on the way from the umami receptors on the side of our tongue, prepare the stomach to better digest food—in particular, meat. Something similar happens in the pancreas, too. And the simple fact that we enjoy food laden with umami, that we are more content when eating it, makes it easier to digest.
Adding MSG is one way of bringing extra umami tastiness to your cooking. Sure, if you throw great fistfuls of it into the pot, there may be some unpleasant side effects and your food will taste awful, but used sparingly, it genuinely does make food taste better and gives it more mouthfeel and flavor length. That said, as always, if you can generate umami from the primary ingredients in a dish, all the better—after all, neat MSG does taste like bacon-flavored potato chips, which is not the most refined of flavors. A dashi made with dried konbu and fresh-grated katsuobushi will always taste better, deeper, more satisfying than one made from a powder, in the same way that fresh stock tastes better than a Knorr cube.