Ordinary Gweilo

Continuing the food theme, I found this article from The Observer very interesting.  I have long been aware of so-called "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" (headaches and worse after eating Chinese food) and the other concerns about monosodium glutamate, so I tend to avoid the stuff if possible.  Perhaps without good reason:

At the University of Western Sydney the researchers concluded, tersely: ‘Chinese restaurant syndrome is an anecdote applied to a variety of postprandial illnesses; rigorous and realistic scientific evidence linking the syndrome to MSG could not be found.’

Science has still not found a convincing explanation for CRS: indeed, some researchers suggest it may well be to do with the other things diners have imbibed there – peanuts, shellfish, large amounts of lager. Others say that fear of MSG is a form of mass psychosis – you suffer the symptoms you’ve been told to worry about.

Then there’s a rather obvious question:

If MSG is bad for you – as Jeffrey Steingarten, the great American Vogue food writer once put it – why doesn’t everyone in China have a headache?

Indeed.  Also, glutamate is lurking in many foods under different names:

Ripe cheese is full of glutamate, as are tomatoes. Parmesan, with 1200mg per 100 grams, is the substance with more free glutamate in it than any other natural foodstuff on the planet. Almost all foods have some naturally occurring glutamate in them but the ones with most are obvious: ripe tomatoes, cured meats, dried mushrooms, soy sauce, Bovril and of course Worcester sauce, nam pla (with 950mg per 100g) and the other fermented fish sauces of Asia.

Your mate, Marmite, with 1750mg per 100g, has more glutamate in it than any other manufactured product on the planet – except a jar of Gourmet Powder straight from the Ajinomoto MSG factory. On the label, Marmite calls it ‘yeast extract’. Nowhere in all their literature does the word ‘glutamate’ appear. I asked Unilever why they were so shy about their spread’s key ingredient, and their PR told me that it was because it was ‘naturally occurring … the glutamate occurs naturally in the yeast’.

Heston Blumenthal, the somewhat eccentric owner of the Fat Duck in Bray, which was recently acclaimed as the best restaurant in the world, uses MSG and many other artificial flavourings in his dishes and makes no secret of the fact.

I am very dubious about artifical additives, and I suspect the food manufacturers of using them mainly so that they can take advantage of cheap ingredients and industrial processes without losing all the flavour, but maybe MSG isn’t any worse than the rest of them.  Anyway, it’s an interesting article.