(Rhythmic guitar music) MALE VOICE: Well, this is a series about something that appears in food all over our society.

JENNIFER LIN LEMESUIRIER: It's a little bit of a brighter white, a little bit more fine-grained.

MALE VOICE: It's in grocery stores, it's in restaurants.

SARAH E. TRACY: It's everywhere.

Doritos, any kind of flavored potato chips.

Any kind of microwave dinner or prepared sauce, condiments.

MALE VOICE: In fact, it's so common that most people don't even know they're eating it.

JENNIFER: And it looks a little bit like a drug.

I'll just be super honest.

MALE VOICE: It's called monosodium glutamate or MSG.

(Text clicking) (Sizzle of oil in wok) TIM MA: MSG is monosodium glutamate.

Like to me, it's, it's savory salt.

It's another flavoring, it's another spice.

If you consider umami like one of the five tastes now, it does make everything delicious.

Just like you need salt in everything, otherwise you won't taste the spices.

MSG has this history of being bad for you and just like consuming any amount of it could be bad.

But, you know, studies have shown now that like, in the amount that we consume, it's not dangerous.

(Tape clicking) (Button clicking) SARAH: The rough scientific canon is that there are five basic tastes sweet, salty, bitter, sour.

And then recently, it's been agreed upon in the 21st century that we have a fifth taste called umami.

And evidence for that was that we identified these unique molecular receptors for glutamate and it was called umami.

Glutamate is naturally occurring, and we can identify large amounts of glutamate in foods that are used the world around, like mushrooms, and aged cheese, and tomatoes.

Human breast milk was the clincher.

(Baby cooing) ♪♪ JENNIFER LIN LEMESUIRIER: I was watching a food show.

It was a throwaway comment.

The host said, "Yeah, the whole controversy over MSG started with one letter to the 'New England Journal of Medicine' in 1968."

I was like, "What?

One letter?

"To the editor, for several years, since I have been in this country, I've experienced a strange syndrome whenever I have eaten out in a Chinese restaurant."

In the original letter, Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok, he identifies himself as a medical professional.

He says, "I'm from China, and there's this weird thing that happens whenever I go to Chinese restaurants only in the U.S." He says, "I get this weird sort of headache.

Sometimes I feel a little tingly.

Oh, well, maybe it's the cooking wine.

Maybe I'm having a bad reaction to that."

And at the very end of the letter he says, "And, you know, maybe it's the presence of monosodium glutamate."

The responses were, mildly racist.

They were satirical, but not very good satire.

JENNIFER: This one letter and all of these really humorous comedic responses somehow spawned this myth that MSG is bad for you.

TIM: Lucky Danger and MSG were never going to happen without each other.

It was never a consideration not to use MSG.

It would be just like a consideration of opening a French restaurant without butter.

I've always known that MSG has been around.

And being classically French trained, because there's no Chinese culinary schools, it was always kind of like a trick in the bag, but now it's like front and center in my professional cooking; because pretty much everything I've touched since the pandemic has been around Chinese food.

And that's been a very intentional choice.

(Wok clanking) TIM: I never want to say that Lucky Danger is redefining Chinese food in America.

It's really just updating it, because it hasn't been updated since the "Chinese restaurant syndrome" thing was happening.

My uncle very much falls into the "Chinese restaurant syndrome."

So, his restaurant and his cooking to this day, still wears the badge of "no MSG."

That's always been a funny conversation just because we come from two different generations, but both in the restaurant industry.

When he ran a restaurant, MSG was a way to lose your business.

JENNIFER: This moment of MSG becoming this sort of scary object is tied into a longer history of Chinese food generally being thought of as dirty as lesser.

If you go back to the 1800's, Chinese restaurants were considered basically co-equal with opium dens, and places where people preyed on the young, innocent white citizens of this country.

♪♪ JENNIFER: But the term "Chinese restaurant syndrome" actually came in some of the later responses to Dr. Kwok's letter.

It really wasn't until the news articles that picked this up and started running with it that you see the zeroing in and the focus on MSG.

It's the late 1960's, people are really suspicious of things like saccharin and, you know, DDT.

And you have this substance that is called monosodium glutamate.

It doesn't sound very safe.

SARAH: So MSG hit a nerve, not only because of these cultural biases, but because of a general increase in alarm around food contamination.

And it hit this note in American culture of who gets to be American?

SARAH: This was also precisely a moment in which the environmental movement in the United States and consumer activism around food labels, against industrial additives in consumer products and foods.

There was a whole bunch of new environmental regulations that were put into place in the late sixties and early seventies that had never existed before, The Clean Water Act, seatbelts in cars.

That regulation was put in place by the same consumer advocate who took the debate around MSG safety to Congress, Ralph Nader.

RALPH NADER: And without information easily accessible to the consumer and without permitting the aggrieved consumer of practical remedies in law, the market system becomes a fraud.

SARAH: There was awareness of, "Oh wait, there are things added to foods that have scary chemical names that we need to actually be researching because they might have effects that we don't understand."

MALE VOICE: Prepared meats inspected and passed by the United States Department of Agriculture are clean, safe, wholesome, and truthfully labeled.

♪♪ TIM: Lucky Danger's roots are back in my family's history.

Right before the pandemic in 2019, my uncle and I and our entire family's history was inducted into the Smithsonian's American History Museum.

Just because Chinese food has played such a important and pivotal role in food in America.

After that event, the pandemic was already in America, and it really hit like three or four months later, and it decimated the restaurant industry.

(Dramatic music) TIM: During a time where there was takeout only, you would think that Chinese businesses would have thrived, but the given climate of anti-Asian hate, really hurt Chinese businesses.

♪♪ TIM: The pandemic had allowed me and pretty much everybody slow down and look at like what's important.

I think it's really to just like introduce culture through food, especially given... the anti-Asian hate events, and incidents, and rhetoric that's happened over time, it's very important now to make sure that there's an opposing message to be said.

(Camera clicking) JENNIFER: I feel like food is one of the areas where misinformation is extremely powerful.

Because you're talking about something that you take into the body, that transforms your body as you eat it.

If you think about some of the less overt things that we say about Chinese food, right?

"You eat Chinese food and then you're hungry an hour later."

You could look at that scientifically and say, "Well, maybe you're filling up on fried rice and you're eating like simple carbs for your entire meal."

But what happens is that turns into shorthand for, "Oh, Chinese food, Asian food, it's just not nutritious."

The anti-Asian hate in relation to COVID and the idea, "Oh, well, clearly all of you people eat bats."

It's just a slightly different manifestation of the same sort of thing.

♪♪ TIM: When we opened as a pop-up in Washington, D.C., we didn't tell anybody that we used MSG, but we used it very, very heavily.

When Lucky Danger opened, it opened to a lot of critical success and just everybody being like, "Oh, what's so good about it?"

Actually, we came to Arlington and we trained a new staff.

We were getting very poor feedback.

Nothing else changed in terms of how we thought we were doing it.

And then when we took a deeper dive, we found out that MSG was being omitted.

When we reintroduced MSG here after several weeks, like everything just kind of took a turn.

(Button clicking) SARAH: Is this actually good for you?

Should I actually be eating this?

And it's such a riddle.

I think that there is reason for us to have more nuanced understanding of MSG and umami now, because we have more research about how taste sensation works throughout the body.

I don't think that it's sufficient explanation to just say, "Well, we knew less then, a whole bunch of people told a whole bunch of lies about MSG being bad for you.

And now we know it's totally fine and good and there is nothing else to say."

So, if someone genuinely believes that MSG gives them headaches or gastro side effects, then I have time for that.

Because we all have to live in our own bodies and no one else is going to take care of your body.

JENNIFER: I think the biggest thing people should take away is that MSG is not a scary ingredient.

But also more broadly, that there aren't a lot of actually scary ingredients in food.

♪♪ JENNIFER: Food is very personal.

Food is very individual.

And I think you have the freedom to be experimental.

I would just say, as someone who works with words and arguments, ask yourself, "Whose voice is in my head when I'm telling myself I shouldn't eat this?"

♪♪ (Knife cutting) TIM: I think an easy introduction is to, in one of your dishes, it doesn't have to be a Chinese dish, is to replace your salt with MSG and see what it does.

TIM: There are still some that will come into the shop and be like, "Do you use MSG?

And we're like, "Yes, we use MSG."

And they're like, "Can you leave it out?

And like, "We can, we prefer not to."

And then they just walk out.

And to a certain degree, you just accept that, you know, maybe that's just not your customer, and we don't wanna put our version of the food out, that's not our version.

♪♪ TIM: My uncle ate here for the first time when we were just like filming a bit.

And we actually have him on camera eating it.

And he's like, just he kept eating it.

He's like, you know, "What do you do?"

I was just like, it's probably the MSG Uncle Paul."

And he's like, "Don't tell anybody."

JENNIFER: The attitudes we have toward food, positive or negative, are wrapped up in a whole bunch of other things that are are really hard to tease apart.

But I think we need to try, I think we need to say, "Where did you get the idea that this is a good food and this is a bad food?"

I hope that as we talk more about food, and identity, and culture, we can have those bigger conversations.

♪♪