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Food manufacturers make a big deal about not adding MSG to their food, and some Chinese restaurants advertise that they don´t use MSG. Obviously there must be some terrible consequences of MSG. Otherwise, why brag about not having used it? I can´t think of another food-related issue in which public perception is so totally and provably wrong in every respect. In fact:
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MSG is a natural product
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MSG is in no way harmful
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MSG contributes greatly to taste and enjoyment of food
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Most manufactured foods that claim ‘no MSG´ have added it under another name
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Some of the home-cooked foods that you most enjoy have the highest levels of natural MSG
Some Background
For centuries, traditional Japanese cooking has used ‘dashi´ as the basic sauce ingredient. Dashi is an extract of certain seaweed and of dried bonito. Although to my palate, the flavour of dashi alone is not particularly attractive, it greatly enhances the flavour of other foods. To the usual tastes of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter, Japanese add ‘umami´, a kind of mouth-filling sensation.
In 1908 a Japanese scientist showed that the umami chemical in seaweed was glutamic acid, a natural amino acid. Since glutamic acid is a component of nearly every protein, it was a simple matter to obtain pure glutamate as a replacement for seaweed extract. Not only did this eliminate the rotting seaweed aroma, but it also meant reproducible and controllable amounts of flavour enhancer could be added.
The most convenient chemical form for glutamate is a salt containing one atom of sodium, that is, mono sodium glutamate: MSG. Mono-sodium glutamate crystallises nicely, is easy to purify and easy to dissolve. In the presence of water, MSG separates into glutamate ions and sodium ions (which may add some salty taste but can otherwise be disregarded). It is the glutamate ion that our taste buds sense, and it doesn´t matter where the glutamate came from, whether it had been in a monogamous relationship with a single sodium atom or had been until recently part of a high-glutamate vegetable protein.
There is a deep evolutionary reason why our taste buds react favourably to glutamate. It is an important component of most proteins, and can be released by aging, cooking, fermenting, boiling, or possibly even by chewing. We can´t taste protein directly, but we do respond to glutamate. It´s a biochemical marker saying, ‘This food contains nutritious protein´.