Because your brother-in-law regularly gave your mother migraines?
Thank you
I used to get headaches after eating the egg drop soup at the local Chinese restaurant. And I still suspect it was very high in MSG. My father liked to cook Chinese food, and actually had a large tin of MSG in the spice cupboard, and his food never gave me problems. Nor did anything else at that or any other restaurant. But to this day, I believe it was an MSG reaction. I ate the soup anyway, because it tasted good enough to be worth the headache.
Oh, and I sometimes get a twinge from aged cheddar. Aged cheddar is the nectar of the gods, however, so it’s worth some minor physical reactions.
I have to say, it never occurred to me that the MSG thing was racist, though.
(emphasis added)
It’s not definitive evidence of no link, but at this point the evidence is tenuous. I wonder if some foods (e.g., egg drop soup) are extremely salty, and if that’s the trigger, not the MSG.
I don’t think the idea is that if you eschew MSG, you’re a racist or bigot or something like that. It’s more that reaction against MSG was helped along likely not just by its scary-sounding chemically name, but also racist or “vaguely racist” (as one article I linked to above put it) associations with Asians and cheap food, at least early on.
And when someone tells me they avoid MSG or that it causes them headaches, I will pretty much never argue that, because what’s the point, and it’s rude? (I say “pretty much never” because I have some friends that I could see myself having a spirited discussion with.) I just nod my head and say, okay, I’ll make sure there’s no MSG in what I make you and I do as I say and avoid using my white crystals of delicious for that person. (And it’s fine, because there’s also a lot of foods I don’t like that extra umami in. For example, with a delicate chicken soup to be eaten as a clear broth with noodles, I only like that seasoned with salt and pepper, no MSG, no bouillon cubes to amp it up. A heartier chicken stew? Yeah, that I might spike.)
She tolerated him. He was (and is) a major pain-in-the-ass trigger.
There was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle comic, back in the day, where they were fighting a Chinese gang that had their own weird mutant guy on it. When they asked the Big Bad guy what the deal was with their mutant, he replied, “He ate the MSG straight out of the can.”
I have way more experience with salt than with msg. No, I’ve never gotten a headache from salty food. Nor was that soup especially salty.
It might have had some obscure Chinese ingredient that i react to, i suppose. Since i never had a dangerous reaction, I’ve never bothered to investigate. I still enjoy Chinese food, and cook it at home as well as frequenting local restaurants. The only thing i worry about is members of the capsaicin family lurking, undocumented, in a dish, because i dislike them enough that i probably won’t eat the dish.
I’ve seen an awful lot of “gluten free” products that should never have had gluten. Like sour cream. Or jelly.
Going back to the OP - I don’t think the -whole- MSG thing was racist hysteria, but that much of it was. I linked the prior threads to try to prevent the rehash of the prior wars (and thank everyone for being restrained about it), in which I did recount a friend of mine who distrusted ‘foreign’ foods because he didn’t know what people put it in / it was dirty / didn’t know what went on in the back even though he would eat at the local $.69 burger shack that was certainly more of a risk in every way.
People like that absolutely used the MSG hysteria (and that’s the best word for it, thank you nightshadea) as the reason for why they distrusted such foods. It gave people who were afraid of different foods (or cultures, or race) something to point at to say “I’m not racist, I have a real issue!”. Which is NOT to say that there are people who don’t have issues with one or more ethnic foods: it can be psychosomatic (like my issues with Pizza), it can be a sensitivity to a specific ingredient they otherwise might never encounter (I have another friend that reacts poorly to cloud ear fungus and took forever to figure it out), salt (because lots of people reflexively resalt food that might already be damn salty), or even a personal sensitivity to MSG.
In my case, I long ago had a few issues with some Chinese food, but quickly figured out it was from eating too much (lunch buffet!), oversalting (and/or eating too many salted shrimp) , and not drinking enough water - it was very similar to a dehydration headache, which is what cued me in. All the sodium is additive after all. For that matter, I’m sure that in the vast scope of Chinese food in American history and the geographical distribution, there have almost certainly been cases where poor quality or improperly handled food has causes an illness and therefore suspicion. Then again, same issues happen with major national chains. Correlation is not causation.
So back to the OP. I agree that the amount of panic concerning MSG is certainly a massive overreaction, and that in many cases, it came from a thinly disguised fear of the other. That it became a banner for people to look down on other food cultures unclean and unsafe practices. At this point, it is very possibly one of those things that is so deeply ingrained culturally that many people may not even realize that the assumption is and was racist, because the ‘facts’ are now a cultural meme.
BUT - I won’t automatically ascribe racist intent to anyone who says they are concerned about MSG, like others, I would want them to examine their reasons. What is the evidence? Is it all Chinese dishes or just one (I’m thinking about my cloud ear friend)? Has it always been this way? Because various forms, ‘natural’ and refined are part of our foods, and if you are truly sensitive, you’re going to need to be careful. Honestly, I’d like it if those here who do appear to have a sensitivity (and I’m not calling your experiences to doubt) would be willing to do a test with a $1.99 pouch of MSG (not the whole thing at once of course!) from the average Asian market. Sure it’s not going to be a double blind, and it’s asking you to have a headache, but I think it would be a worthwhile test.
As for whether it is worth it as a food additive, I find it so. If you have a dish lacking in ‘Zazz’, you can absolutely see a benefit. And I find it essential for making restaurant level fried rice which can often have a dull flavor even with the best techniques. But it doesn’t need to be culty at all.
I don’t know about MSG-phobia being racist, but I can assure the doubters that MSG-induced temple-throbbing is very much a real thing.
I don’t get headaches from it, but if I eat a lot of MSG, my temples pound with my heartbeat. I’ve only ever experienced it at Chinese restaurants, and only years ago, when we used to eat at a Cantonese place (the Peking in Washington, DC).
Maybe I’ll give that a try next time I’m shopping in Chinatown. In tiny quantities, it would probably perk up a lot of dishes.
See? Points to @puzzlegal, we can do an OG column style test right here in the SDMB. It’s the second coming of Una! (who I never chatted with since I was a lurker in them thar days).
But yeah, I buy a pouch of MSG every 2-3 years, a little goes a long way (other than in fried rice for me). I find subbing 1/2 teaspoon of MSG for table salt in many dishes makes a nice difference, especially in slow cooked or braised dishes that have long cook times.
Let us know how the dish (since this is Cafe society after all) turns out, and of course, if you do have a headache when adding it to an existing dish.
Maybe this is the point you’re making, but those two can have thickeners and stabilizers added to them. I don’t know if any brands contain wheat derived thickeners, but gums and starches can be used, so it’s not too crazy to label them.
If it had lots of MSG, then it was salty. The S in MSG is sodium, and it works the same way as it does in table salt.
I do the same thing ParallelLines does, which is to sometimes sub half the salt in a dish with an equal amount of MSG. That results in less sodium overall, but its contribution is not zero. And there’s nothing stopping someone from adding enough MSG that it dominates the saltiness of a dish.
How do you know which ingredient might have caused it?
Well, yes and no. Glutemate ions are a lot bigger than chloride ions, so MSG has less sodium by mass than salt does. And it also has more flavor by mass than salt, so it’s usually used in smaller quantities. If you’re looking to get the same amount of flavor from either salt or MSG, you’ll get a lot less sodium from the MSG.
I don’t know for sure.
But I haven’t heard of any other suspects, and it didn’t seem to matter what dishes we ate (so it was unlikely to be say, Sichuan pepper (which would have been the wrong area of China, anyway).
If I were convinced that something in the meal caused my reaction, I’d look at ingredients that I don’t already encounter on a daily basis such as wood-ear mushrooms, rice wine vinegar, black vinegar, bamboo shoots, white pepper, five-spice powder, oyster sauce, sesame oil, fermented soybeans, canned baby corn, etc. Or even high salt in general.
I suppose it could be some mystery ingredient, not MSG, but it’s still suspect until proven innocent.
There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that it causes “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome.” Maybe it’s something else, but, if so, nobody has figured out what that something is.