I don’t know if anyone has actually looked closely at a packet of MSG (monosodium glutamate). Chances are you haven’t seen or used any MSG since around 1975. But if you do, you will see under the Aji-No-Moto logo the now frequently used word – UMAMI. The word “umami” didn’t really come into our vocabulary until the early 2000s when it became the fifth of the basic tastes including sweet, salty, sour and bitter. My mother used to add MSG to many of our meals and marinades when we were young and then, sometime in the mid 1970s, it disappeared from the kitchen! But what tweaked my interest is that although MSG has had plenty of controversy over whether or not it can cause sickness, it is UMAMI – a much sought after taste in our modern world.
When I looked up the definition of Umami it read :
Umami (/uːˈmɑːmi/ from Japanese: 旨味 Japanese pronunciation: [ɯmami]), or savoriness, is one of the five basic tastes.[1] It has been described as savory and is characteristic of broths and cooked meats.[2][3][4][5]:35–36
People taste umami through taste receptors that typically respond to glutamates and nucleotides, which are widely present in meat broths and fermented products. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umami
In the early 1900s, a Japanese Professor and chemist so loved his wife’s dashi that he wanted to find out what exactly it was that made her dashi (Japanese stock) so good. He decided that the distinct flavour in the dashi was not one of your normal taste sensations – sweet, sour, bitter, or salty – but something else. He used his chemistry skills to break down the dashi into components, until he discovered that the taste that he could not decipher was a glutamate – an amino acid which is a building block of protein. The source of this glutamate (glutamic acid) was from the kombu seaweed his wife was putting in the dashi. It is a natural ingredient found in meat, poultry, eggs, vegetables and milk. He named this taste as Umami from the word Umai, meaning delicious in Japanese.
So :
- MSG is the sodium salt of glutamic acid, one of the most common naturally occurring amino acids.
- It is made these days with sugar cane, in a process of bacterial fermentation similar to the way cheese and yoghurts are made.
- It contains only 12 % sodium compared to salt which contains 30 % sodium.
But what of the dangers of MSG?
There were some who felt that they were having reactions to the MSG – headaches, hot flushes, nausea, fluttering heartbeats. Some called it the Chinese Restaurant Syndrome – bringing on some xenophobic and racist reactions from the public. In 2016, Anthony Bourdain said
“I think MSG is good stuff … You know what causes Chinese restaurant syndrome? Racism”
As Uncle Roger says :
This is also crazy, as MSG is found in MANY processed foods – processed meats like hotdogs, pepperoni etc, KFC and other fast food restaurants, pringles and other chips. So go figure. Plus, if you are worried about consuming something that could damage your health, just think about salt … AND if it is found naturally in food, so maybe it isn’t quite as bad for you as was thought.
