Get The MSG?

This month Olly Mann gets spicy with a surprising discovery and a flavour revelation

The white powder arrived in a brown paper bag. I ripped it open to reveal the plastic packaging within, temptingly labelled "PURITY GREATER THAN 99 PER CENT". Endorphins triggered, I eagerly licked my finger, dipped it in, and applied a small quantity direct to my tongue, just to get a hit. I felt the impact immediately. It tasted like Chinese takeaway.

Such was my first experience mailordering MSG. It won’t be my last.

Monosodium glutamate, the umami seasoning frequently added to Chinese cuisine, is something

I’d always been led to believe was harmful to your health. Growing up in the 1980s, I heard my parents discuss it in the same disdainful tone as carcinogenic sweeteners and tooth-rotting sugar, and can recall restaurants displaying "NO MSG" signs in their windows.

As an adult, I’d not actively avoided it, but had certainly never considered buying some. Until recently, had a pollster stopped me in the street and asked me if I agreed with the statement that MSG was harmful, I think I would have concurred—if only on the basis that any chemical concoction is surely an unnecessary accompaniment to fresh meat and veg.

But then I investigated the roots of anti-msg rhetoric for an episode of my podcast The Retrospectors, in which we pore over the events of a particular day in history. The day in question was April 4, 1968— when Dr Robert Ho Man Kwok, a research scientist in Washington,