MSG and racism

For some years back in the ballpark 70s / 80s, the Guinness brewery company ran a series of ads for their eponymous stout themed:

Guinness: I’ve never tried it and I don’t like it!

They were trying to break into the US market in a big way and make Guinness a mainstream product. At a time when Budweiser, Schlitz, and Pabst were most Americans’ idea of “beer” whereas Guinness was a rare specialty product found only at hard-core genuine English/Irish expat hangouts.

In each episode, the character would loudly protest how they didn’t like Guinness, despite admittedly never having tried it. Their friend would inveigle them to have a sip which they’d take tentatively & dubiously. The ecstatic epiphany would immediately follow. “I’ve tried Guiness and I love it!”

The campaign worked and in the US Guinness Stout became pretty much a mainstream product found in grocery stores and every ersatz “pub” in the land.

Bottom line: I call what @BigT’s talking about the “Guinness effect”, but I don’t think anyone but me uses that phrase.

Yeah, there used to be a sort of meme (before anything was called a meme) about British people distrusting or expressing distaste for ‘foreign muck’ (which might be any kind of foreign food or drink) as ‘only fit for [insert racist term here]’
It’s hard to tell whether this was just blanket xenophobia, or whether that blanket was a closely stitched patchwork of many different pieces of specific racism.

Yes, it’s like Mitford sisters’ father’s little saying: Abroad is beastly and all foreigners are fiends.

Correction: Abroad is absolutely bloody…

What if he refuses to eat haggis because you can’t trust Scottish people not to put weird chemicals in their food that make you sick?

Scotch is not a weird chemical.

Or devolves, in the hypothetical Princhester creates - it’s not so long ago that “The Anglo-Saxon Race” and “the Gaelic Race” would have been current terms. And racism would be perfectly apropos .