MSG myths and distractions: So why is McDonald’s trying to break the MSG taboo?

The news that McDonald’s is testing a fried chicken sandwich in the USA is no surprise.

Sandwiches filled with fried chicken breast have been one of the fastest growing segments in the food industry, making Chick-fil-A, the controversial company that popularised them, into one of the top fast food chains in the USA.

What is more of a surprise is that McDonald’s has admitted that it is testing using the flavour enhancer called monosodium glutamate (MSG) as part of the sandwich. On one level this should be expected. Chick-fil-A uses MSG, so McDonald’s was at least going to try when formulating its own sandwich.

Yet McDonald’s claims it does not use MSG in any other of its current products in the USA.

The reason for this, of course, is that from the 1960s MSG has been accused of causing migraines, racing heartbeats, burning sensations and a host of other symptoms that has, rather unfairly, been called ‘Chinese restaurant syndrome’ because the substance was allegedly over-used in cheap Chinese restaurants in the USA. Many studies have failed to show any such clear link, yet the fears have proved remarkably long-lasting.

In 1995 when Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) was launching in India, activists opposing the launch accused the international chain of breaching the stated limits for MSG in its food, and the Bangalore City Corporation issued a show-cause notice to KFC’s first outlet. For a while it seemed that KFC’s launch in India might be held up due to the MSG issue, and much work had to be done to defuse the issue.

More recently though MSG seems to have benefitted from the attempts to see how understanding science can enhance cooking, as in the movement called molecular gastronomy. Both convinced by the science exoneratingMSG and curious about how its flavour enhancing power works, chefs and scientists have been experimenting with MSG or trying to replicate its effect. This may have emboldened McDonald’s to break the MSG taboo.

Yet MSG remains confusing. Just as its effect is tantalisingly indirect, enhancing other flavours rather than having a clear one of its own, the crystalline white powder has a way of appearing as something it is not. It has often been mistaken for drugs as in one of Mumbai Police’s biggest hauls, in 2015, of mephedrone which last year was revealed apparently to be MSG.

MSG’s proponents sometimes claim it has been used in China for ages, yet the chemical was first identified by a German scientist, Karl Heinrich Ritthausen around 1866, though he did not recognise its significance.

That was done by a Japanese chemist, Kikunae Ikeda, who was investigating why dashi, the broth made from seaweed and dried fish that is at the base of many Japanese dishes, works as well as it does.

Ikeda discovered that dashi was high in a sodium salt of glutamic acid, but his real insight was to realise that this salt seemed able to trigger a sensation of a kind of savoury taste, while also enhancing other tastes. He coined the term umami for it, but this was only recognised as the fifth taste that humans can detect after specific taste receptors for umami (along with those for sweet, sour, bitter and salty) were discovered around 2000.

Ikeda’s paper outlining his discovery was published in Japanese in 1909 and only became widely known in English in 2002. But this didn’t stop him from commercialising his discovery by starting the Ajinomoto company to manufacture commercial MSG.

Glutamic acid is one of the amino acids that form proteins and as such is common in many natural substances, including in our brains (which is one reason why the suggestion that excessive use triggers migraines seemed plausible).

But glutamate, which triggers the umami sensation in humans, is usually tightly bound with other proteins and not free to act on its own. Ikeda discovered that processes like fermenting release glutamate, which is why fresh milk has little of it in free form, but when it becomes cheese, more gets released (parmesan has exceptionally high concentrations of glutamate). Dashi acquired it from two sources – the dried, fermented fish and the slime that forms on the seaweed used to make it.

Ikeda discovered that many other fermented foods traditionally used in eastern Asia all turned out to be high in glutamate, which explains the claims for its long standing use in these cuisines. Intriguingly, human breast milk is high in glutamate, which Ikeda felt explained why we react so well to its taste. He devised a process of applying hydrochloric acid to wheat gluten to release glutamate that was then refined into MSG crystals. (Today MSG is usually made through bacterial fermentation).

Ajinomoto set about marketing MSG aggressively in Asia. The exploding urban populations in China, desperate for cheap, palatable food, took to it happily, and as Chinese spread across the world they took MSG with them. Indonesia was another country where MSG was heavily promoted and sales took off to the extent that, as Aya Hirata Kimura explains in Hidden Hunger, her study of micronutrient deficiencies and food fortification, the government tried to have MSG itself fortified with Vitamin A. In 1956 the Times of India published a letter recommending “pulses, skimmed milk powder, food yeasts, defatted soya bean flour, cotton seed flour and monosodium glutamates” as examples of proteins that could be manufactured on an industrial scale to meet India’s food shortages. In 1978 ToI carried Bachi Karkaria’s description of Mama San, a street food seller in Calcutta’s China Town using “a dash of soya, a pinch of ajinomoto – and ‘one chow mein coming up!’” Ajinomoto’s corporate name had become synonymous with their product, and it had made it one of Japan’s top companies. In 1988 ToI reported that it was seeking to enter the Indian market directly through a collaboration with Albert David Ltd, then a leading pharmaceutical company based in Calcutta.

But a backlash had already begun, starting with a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1968 by Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok, a Chinese medical researcher who said he had noticed something odd after eating in Chinese restaurants in the USA. Dr Kwok said he had experienced “numbness in the back of the neck, gradually radiating to both arms and the back, general weakness, and palpitation.” He wondered if it could be caused by the MSG “used to a great extent for seasoning in Chinese restaurants.”

It is typical of the mysteries of MSG that it has been alleged that this letter was a fabrication, created by a non Chinese doctor as a prank. But a real Dr. Kwok apparently did exist and his family insists he wrote the letter.

What can’t be doubted is the reaction it got, with letters flooding in from readers asserting they also felt similar unease after eating Chinese food. Other media picked it up and the story kept spreading around the world.

In 1990 Kalchakra, the first Hindi news video cassette launched with a story on ‘Chinese restaurant syndrome.’

One researcher has noted how distinctly racist a lot of this coverage was. The MSG scare gave some people the chance to unleash their low opinions of Chinese restaurants, and the Chinese in general, who they alleged were corrupting local food practices.

Some Chinese restaurants countered by asserting that real Chinese cooking never used MSG, and hence they were authentic because they were “MSG Free” – which simply gave credence to the “Chinese restaurant syndrome” rumours.

As with the Indian attacks on KFC in 1995, a broader campaign – against immigrants or multinationals – was being channelled through MSG. (The fact that the product was Japanese in origin was ignored). But was MSG at fault? Scientists could find no link, and another explanation is possible.

Customers associate Chinese food with being cheap, so most restaurants can’t afford to pay for better quality ingredients, and it is overeating this food that makes people feel sick – and MSG gets the rap.

The problem is that explanations like this, and a lot of the research exonerating MSG, ultimately tends to have been paid for, or influenced, by the intense global public relations campaign put in place by Ajinomoto. In India, for example, one of the leading PR companies published a Glutamate Newsletter for several years devoted to countering MSG fears. In all the claims and counterclaims, and the larger agendas of both the pro and anti MSGsides, it can be exceedingly hard to figure out what to believe.

It is also becoming slightly irrelevant.

Other substances have been devised that also trigger umami receptors – hydrolysed proteins, like certain yeast extracts, work like MSG while still allowing products to claim they are MSG free. Chefs have created natural umami stimulants by combining “Parmesan cheese, anchovies, black olives, tomato puree, porcini mushrooms, and balsamic vinegar, all of which contribute umami and interact synergistically with each other,” explain Ole Mouritsen and Klavs Styrbaek in their book Umami: Unlocking the Secrets of the Fifth Taste. They are referring to a paste called Taste No.5 sold by the Waitrose chain in the UK. Another example is Hong Kong’s XO Sauce, which combines aged ham, dried scallops and shrimp.

These ‘umami bomb’ products are likely to be a bit beyond the budget of McDonald’s and, perhaps calculating that the confusions about MSG and umami are so widespread, they decided to go ahead with the original. But it is worth noticing how even in the reaction they got, MSG is serving to conceal the real problem: the cheap meat used in fried chicken sandwiches.

This comes from broiler chickens raised in desperately cramped, unhygienic conditions, pumped with antibiotics to keep away diseases and help them grow fast.

Given the abundant cruelty to animals, health risks and environmental damage from broiler farms that cheap chicken meat represents, the risks from MSG are hardly worth considering.

Source:- Economic Times