Chinese restaurants are my family’s favorite. It’s a common immigrant story; it was the starter kit for Ronald Reagan’s American dream.
Although it is long gone, I can remember my family’s second restaurant almost perfectly: two statues of guardian lions with obvious signs of weathering flanked the door, a green makeshift box for the clerk’s car keys stood against the one the right side, and a small piece of flowers adorned their feet. The flowers could have used more love. They perhaps symbolized the pressure and tension between my parents, one invested in design accents, the other spartan with finances.
Blue fluorescents and a large neon sign shone across the entire facade: ‘We do not use MSG.’
The fear of monosodium glutamate felt pretty intense in the ’90s, and I had a front row seat as I played with action figures at the bar. Long Islanders wanted assurance from my mother that we had no MSG in the building. It would make them feel terrible later, they said. Headache, tachycardia, sweating, bloating, fatigue, diarrhea: a bleak shopping list of possible side effects. Mostly it was an awkward, polite interaction. Sometimes it became hostile.
Considering how many polysyllabic additives were on the back of a cereal box, I had a hard time believing that monosodium glutamate was more deadly than any branded mascot chunks we were eating. And science proved my hypothesis correct: There is no verifiable, peer-reviewed, reproducible research linking MSG to the amorphous confluence of symptoms known as “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome.”
On the one hand, as a lifelong member of the service industry, I respect your choices. You don’t have to put anything in your body you don’t want, you don’t have to explain it to yourself, and you have to trust that a restaurant will honor that.
However, as a minority in the US who has taken enough of his college classes to know who Edward Said is, it’s hard not to see this whole thing as something that smacks of yellow peril and orientalism.
It is a pervasive and persistent myth that haunted me throughout my childhood. Along with the implication that our restaurant served alley cats and net ducks at the local pond because our food was so cheap, my classmates parroted their parents and accused us of serving poison. So my mother put up a sign.
This childhood experience serves as context for a recent trigger episode. While scrolling through Instagram, I saw Noma Projects (the food lab arm of Denmark’s fine-dining restaurant) talking about the “naturally occurring” MSG it harvests in its mushroom garum ($25 for 250 milliliters). My eye twitched. Now that I have my own restaurant, I just say ‘too bad’ to people when they protest about the taste improvement. But this sight brought back old feelings of others and shame.
I respect the work that Noma Projects does in Copenhagen. Regardless of your feelings about fine dining and six-hour meals costing 5,000 kroner, Noma is an undeniable paradigm changer of gastronomy.
It has inspired generations of chefs and trained some of the industry’s most influential visionaries, and that cultural outflow is hitting your supermarket shelves whether you realize it or not – and perhaps more importantly, whether you know it like it or not.
But this was a degree of insincerity I could not tolerate.
It’s subtle, but using the term “naturally occurring” implies that a cheap, synthetic, and plentiful alternative exists. It insinuates that Noma’s MSG is different and better. It suggests that the version doesn’t make you feel bad the way MSG is positioned. It conjures up buzzwords like organic, free-range, biodynamic, and cruelty-free (if you don’t consider a world-famous restaurant brand built on unpaid labor to be a form of cruelty).
Monosodium glutamate was originally discovered by boiling down large amounts of kelp to create a savory extract. Modern MSG production uses a much more efficient process that utilizes bacteria that produce glutamic acid by digesting the glucose in fast-growing crops such as corn, sugar cane or cassava. The glutamic acid is then neutralized to create water and monosodium glutamate. It’s the same idea of using bacteria to our advantage to make yogurt, and the same principle used to make Noma Project’s mushroom garum. They use some type of fermentation, whether driven by bacteria or yeast, to digest the glucose in mushrooms. Glucose and glutamic acid are present in all living things. Your body uses glutamic acid to read this essay.
Due to a global pandemic, millions of Asian American entrepreneurs suffered immensely in December 2019 and the months – and years – since. My own family’s restaurant lost half its sales in the month that matters most to us, the month that makes or breaks the fiscal year for many operators. It was a devastating blow to a business run by a single mother who, at 70, still works seven days a week. And why did this happen? Not because we were all huddled inside to keep each other safe – at least not yet. This happened because of xenophobia, racism and prejudice. No one dared to eat in a Chinese restaurant. The reservation book has been emptied.
New York’s Chinatown was destroyed by September 11 and never recovered. The neighborhood retreated east, while Italian restaurants and New American bistros claimed the west.
Then, during the coronavirus crisis, restaurant operators who were aging but still selling six dumplings for $3 couldn’t afford the rent increases thanks to real estate developers and rampant inflation. Many did not survive a bad December. Those who did did not survive the disastrous spring that followed. Chinatown is now a disjointed collection of businesses and grannies unrepresented in zoning discussions. The sexy newcomer micro-neighborhood “Dimes Square” has pushed Chinatown out of the Lower East Side.
And this is in no small part due to the misinformation and fear that has colored the Chinese-American diaspora since we started building your railroads. (Although you’ve given up all that heavy-duty infrastructure, America – no backs.)
There isn’t enough room on the page to go through the history of it all, but misinformation about MSG is closely related. It sounds like something trivial, but it affects the lives of real people. It affects our livelihood. So when I read about Noma Projects’ “naturally occurring” MSG, it was hard not to raise the hairs on the back of my neck.
It promotes disinformation and takes advantage of depressingly low levels of scientific literacy. It is hurting Chinese restaurateurs around the world by adding fuel to the fire of fear and ignorance. It’s helping push an entire nation—and the cuisine we so strongly identify with—into the realm of lunch specials: $8.99, choice of egg rolls or wonton soup. It differentiates, otherizes, and watches us, given its platform as an authoritative voice in nutritional science.
We have had a challenging few decades; We don’t need any more saboteurs. So if Noma claims to be an ally of the disenfranchised and underprivileged, it needs to do better.
But we have become cynical because we expect someone from outside the community to advocate for us. So I’m just saying that at my restaurant we buy MSG by the £50 barrel – and that will never change.
Editor’s Note: Noma Projects declined to comment when contacted by TODAY.com, but a representative was keen to clarify that any mention of naturally occurring MSG in relation to the brand’s Mushroom Garum refers to the naturally occurring level of glutamate in the product. The brand does not intend to criticize the use of MSG in other products or cuisines. They say they regret that the work they shared from the Noma Projects lab has been interpreted in any way other than as a source of inspiration.
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
