While some companies market ‘natural’ MSG, my restaurant will stick with the original (2024)

Chinese restaurants are my family’s thing. It’s a very common immigrant story; it was the starter kit for Ronald Reagan’s American dream.

Though it’s long gone, I can remember my family’s second restaurant near perfectly: two guardian lion statues with obvious signs of weathering flanked the door, there was a green makeshift cabinet for the valet’s car keys propped against the one on the right, and a small patch of flowers adorned their feet. The flowers could have used more love. They were perhaps symbolic of the push and pull between my parents, one invested in design touches, the other spartan with the finances.

Shining blue fluorescence over all this frontage was a big neon sign: “We Do Not Use MSG.”

The monosodium glutamate scare felt rather fervent 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 didn’t have MSG in the building. It would make them feel terrible later, they said. Headache, tachycardia, sweating, bloating, fatigue, diarrhea: a dismal grocery list of possible side effects. Most of the time it was an awkward, polite interaction. Sometimes, it turned hostile.

Given how many polysyllabic additives existed on the back of a box of cereal, I had a hard time believing monosodium glutamate was any more lethal than any branded-mascot kibble we ate. And science proved my hypothesis correct: There is no verifiable, peer-reviewed, reproducible research that can link MSG to the amorphous amalgamation of symptoms known as “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome.”

On the one hand, speaking as a lifetime member of the service industry, I respect your choices. You don’t have to put anything in your body you don’t want to, you shouldn’t have to explain yourself, and you should trust that a restaurant will honor that.

However, as a minority in the U.S. who went to enough of his college classes to know who Edward Said is, it’s hard not to see this whole thing as reeking of yellow perilism and Orientalism.

It’s a pervasive and sticky myth that was used to torment me throughout my childhood. Along with the implication that our restaurant served alley cats and netted 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 triggering episode. While scrolling Instagram, I saw Noma Projects (the food lab off-shoot of the fine-dining restaurant in Denmark) going on about the “naturally occurring” MSG it harvests in its mushroom garum ($25 for 250 milliliters). My eye twitched. Now that I own my own restaurant, I simply tell people “too bad” when they protest the flavor enhancement. But this sight brought back old feelings of being othered and shamed.

I respect the work Noma Projects does in Copenhagen. Regardless of your feelings about fine dining and 5,000 kroner, six-hour meals, Noma is an undeniable paradigm shifter of gastronomy.

It has inspired generations of chefs and trained some of the industry’s most influential visionaries, and that cultural runoff hits you in your grocery store shelves whether you realize it or not — and, perhaps more importantly, whether you like it or not.

But this was a level of disingenuousness I could not abide.

It’s subtle, but using the term “naturally occurring” implies there is some cheap, synthetic, abundant alternative. It insinuates Noma’s MSG is different, better. It suggests its version won’t make you feel bad the way MSG is positioned to. It evokes buzzwords like organic, free-range, biodynamic and cruelty-free (if you don’t consider a world-famous restaurant brand built off unpaid labor as a form of cruelty).

Monosodium glutamate was originally discovered by boiling down vast quantities of kelp to create a savory extract. Modern MSG production uses a far more efficient process of harnessing bacteria that produce glutamic acid from 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 utilizing bacteria to our benefit to make yogurt, and the same principle by which Noma Project’s mushroom garum is made. They use some sort of fermentation, whether it be bacterial or yeast-driven, to digest the glucose in mushrooms. Glucose and glutamic acid are in all living things. Your body is utilizing glutamic acid to read this essay.

Due to a global pandemic, millions of Asian American business owners suffered greatly in December 2019 and in the months — and years — following. My own family’s restaurant lost half its business 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 still works seven days a week in her 70s. And why did this happen? Not because we 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 at a Chinese restaurant. The reservation book emptied.

New York’s Chinatown was devastated by 9/11 and it never recovered. The neighborhood receded to the east while Italian restaurants and New American bistros claimed the west.

Then, during COVID, restaurant operators who were aging out but still selling six dumplings for $3 couldn’t match rent hikes thanks to real estate developers and rampant inflation. Many didn’t survive a bad December. Those that did didn’t survive the disastrous spring that followed. Chinatown is now a disjointed collection of businesses and grandmas that go unrepresented in zoning law discussions. The sexy newcomer microneighborhood “Dimes Square” has shoved Chinatown out of the Lower East Side.

And this is in no small part due to the misinformation and fear coloring the Chinese American diaspora since we were building your railroads.(Though you abandoned all that hard-wrought infrastructure, America — no backsies.)

There isn’t enough space on the page to go through the history of it all, but misinformation regarding MSG is closely related. It sounds like something trivial but it affects real people’s lives. It impacts our livelihoods. So when I read about Noma Projects’ “naturally occurring” MSG, it was hard not to raise my hackles.

It is furthering misinformation and profiting off a depressingly low level of scientific literacy. It is hurting Chinese restaurateurs across the globe by adding fuel to the flames of fear and ignorance. It is contributing to pushing an entire people — and the cuisine we are so heavily identified by — down into the realm of lunch specials: $8.99, choice of egg roll or wonton soup. It is differentiating, otherizing and gatekeeping us, given its platform as an authoritative voice on food science.

We’ve had a challenging few decades; we don’t need any more saboteurs. So, if Noma claims to be an ally to the disenfranchised and disadvantaged, it must do better.

But we have grown cynical about expecting anyone from outside the community to advocate for us. So I’ll just say, at my restaurant, we buy MSG by the 50-pound barrel — and that’s never going to change.

Editor’s note: Noma Projects declined to comment when reached by TODAY.com, but a representative did wish 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 kitchens. They say they are sorry to learn that the work they have shared from the Noma Projects lab has been interpreted in some way other than as a source of inspiration.