I was told from a young age that MSG, or monosodium glutamate, is terribly bad for your health. My mom would cook up these delicious black bean noodles and tell me all about her recipe and the way she meticulously prepared everything. But then, she would brag a little, making it clear that she didn’t use any MSG in her cooking, and it was still appetizing! She would tell me all about how MSG was toxic to your health, and dangerous to consume too often. The way my mom warned me made younger me think eating any MSG was equivalent to eating rat poison.
My family frequents Chinese restaurants often, hoping to compare it with the food back in China to see if it can live up to its legacy. Especially when I used to live in California, these visits were quite frequent. Usually eating at these places meant I was enjoying the typical, westernized Chinese food. Kung pao chicken, broccoli stir-fried beef (a dish unusually common with foreigners, my dad says), and the like.
After these meals, I would think back to what my mom and my other family members said about MSG. Is that why I feel so sluggish? So tired, and like I could fall asleep at any instant? Was it because of the MSG I consumed literal seconds ago? Was it really poisoning my nervous system and giving myself an early death?
The answer to all those questions, frankly, is no. Anna Maria Barry-Jester, in now archived website FiveThirtyEight, writes that,
People who suffer after eating MSG may be experiencing the nocebo effect, the lesser-known and poorly understood cousin of the placebo effect. The phenomenon is what happens when suggesting that something can cause a negative reaction induces precisely those physical symptoms.
In fact, the stigma toward MSG comes from a variety of scientific research that were flawed. While MSG may still not necessarily be “good for you,” it certainly is not as poisonous as people drew it out to be. And certainly not as bad as my mom made it seem. In fact, MSG is naturally present in tomatoes! Maybe that’s why my dad’s tomato egg drop soup tastes so good.
The whole taboo against MSG has contributed to demonizing Chinese and other Asian restaurants for using it. The myth itself actually comes from racism when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882. The xenophobia developed during this period extended beyond, and a “1968 letter to the New England Journal of Medicine describing sickness after eating MSG spurred an anti-MSG movement,” McKenna Princing writes in blog Right as Rain. She also names a couple racist nicknames that came from this movement, such as “Chinese restaurant syndrome.”
These implicit forms of racism is incredibly damaging to small, Chinese restaurants owners who depend on their business for money. It is harmful to propagate the idea that eating food at these restaurants will give you all sorts of short and long-term problems, when in reality much of these “facts” are derived from racism toward Chinese immigrants a century ago.