# So the whole MSG thing was racist hysteria?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-the-whole-msg-thing-was-racist-hysteria/954223>\
**Category:** Cafe Society\
**Tags:** food-cooking\
**Created:** [November 12, 2021, 4:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-the-whole-msg-thing-was-racist-hysteria/954223 "2021-11-12T04:02:34Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 25

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**Author:** ![Senegoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senegoid/32/6606_2.png) [@Senegoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Senegoid)\
**Post date:** [November 12, 2021, 6:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-the-whole-msg-thing-was-racist-hysteria/954223/25 "2021-11-12T06:14:33Z")

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Oh, hell, Yet Another Thread of the Monosodium Glutamate cult worship crowd. [We’ve done this to death already.](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-msg-bad-for-you/847850) (This is the same link again that @ParallelLines posted a few posts above.)

That thread is “Ignorance Fighting” at its worst, a shameful miasma of non-infomation (not necessarily _mis_-information) for such a forum as The Straight Dope Message Board.

The gist of the MSG cult apologetics in that thread were along the lines that _modest_ doses of MSG haven’t been shown to bother anybody, therefore anybody who claims to be bothered by _massive_ doses of MSG must be imagining or mis-attributing it; that Chinese restaurants aren’t likely to be using massive doses in their food, therefore anyone who got sick at certain Chinese restaurants 50 years ago must be wrong, etc. etc.

The whole thread was full of fallacious arguments defending MSG – Not that this proved anything one way or the other, but the utterly vacuous argumentation there was a travesty of what The SDMB is supposed to be about.

Example: I wrote:

> [@Is MSG bad for you?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-msg-bad-for-you/847850/5):
>
> Data point: Myself. MSG sometimes affects me this way. It appears to be only large doses, as Chinese food was often reputed to contain. Foods like Campbell’s canned soup or other such prepared foods have never bothered me, even though they often list MSG among the ingredients.

To which **Chronos** replied with this non-sequiter piled upon a non-sequiter:

> [@Is MSG bad for you?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-msg-bad-for-you/847850/9):
>
> So, foods that contain loads of MSG don’t affect you, and therefore you must be susceptible to MSG?
> 
> There’s a hole in this thinking. OK, maybe there is something in Chinese food that isn’t found in other food that you have a bad reaction to. But it can’t be MSG, because MSG is not something that isn’t found in other food.

Here, the first sentence is a total non-sequiter after what I wrote, and the second sentence of the second paragraph is just total speculation with no evidence given (which was repeated by other posters in the thread too). The whole thread was full of stuff like that, as is much of the present thread as well, for that matter.

See [Post #35](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-msg-bad-for-you/847850/35) in that thread for further elaboration.

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