Monosodium glutamate
An example on you why should think differently about MSG
What is MSG
Monosodium glutamate is a chemical that enhances flavour. Wait a chemical? Like artificial? Created in a lab somewhere? Probably toxic?
Sodium chlorid is a chemical that enhances flavour. Wait a chemical? With chlor? Like the stuff that the germans used in WW1 to kill? That stuff is highly dangerous, I would never eat that.
Okay, enough with the hyperbole. Sodium chlorid is just common table salt. Humans need it to survive and most of us eat it every day. To much of it can be bad for you, like almost everything. But back to MSG? Why is our preception of it often so bad? Although I do not know for certain I could imagine it went like this: MSG was first discovered/isolated as a taste substance by japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda. He was researching the taste of dashi, a traditional japanese broth. With that we had a new primary flavour: UMAMI. MSG was then adopted widely in asia and used as a flavour enhancer for many different dishes. When the western wolrd came in contact with food prepared with MSG they had prejudices motivated by racial, cultural and the belive that chemical stuff has to be bad for humans.
Is it wrong to prefer food without added MSG
Many of the things that we eat naturally contain MSG. On example is tomatoes. Which we have been using for long time by concentrating them and then using that concentrate to flavour our dishes. Although there is certainly more to the flavour of tomate paste MSG is nethertheless an important component. In the following I want to argue that advertisments saying “We do not use added MSG” for still have a place.
I am intentionally using pesto as an example here. Suppose there are to options of pesto to buy for you:
- This pesto only contains dried tomatoes, pine nuts, olive oil and parmeggiano regiano.
- In addition to the ingridients of pesto 1. this one contains added salt and MSG.
I would argue the following: It is completly okay to prefer the 1. pesto over the second one as it can be argued that is has a higher quality. It uses less ingridients and we therefore might attribute it to have a better flavour. For the same amount of MSG and salt per weight we would expect it to have all the other flacour compounds that come with the dried tomatoes and cheese. Assuming the same amoutn of salt and MSG per weight the second pesto would have less of the tomatoes and cheese in comparison. We therefore preceive that it is of lower quality as the higher amount of cheese and tomatoes used in the first pesto are more expensive then the added salt and MSG.
Continuing this thought what we can not simply do is to say that we are okay with added salt and not okay with added MSG. In this specific case we might be more okay with added salt because we do not like our pesto to cheesy, therefore we substitute the cheese with salt to achieve the same salt level. Doing the same for the tomatoes, reducing the amoun of them and adding MSG would be equally valid if we prefer a taste with less tomato but want the same amount of MSG.
When I see a restaurant advertised as no added MSG I will in my head assume the following: It can be cheaper to make a good tasting dish when using added MSG. If there is no advertisment that indicates the absence of added MSG I would still eat there. If the meal then tastes very well I would applaud the chef for being skilled. If the meal could have needed some MSG in my opinion I will critic the chef for not using MSG. An restaurant that does not use added MSG might intentionally use ingridients in their cooking that have high MSG content and therefore make the meal taste well. These high content MSG ingridients might bring additional flavour to a dish because of all the other flavour compounds that are in them. Or they might just make the meal more expensive then it needs to be.