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China’s True Dash of Flavor

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*CheerLeader*Mao
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Posted: Feb 19, 2007 - 02:00 PM
Post subject: China’s True Dash of Flavor

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/opinion/18dunlop.html?em&ex=11720340 00&en=6a9c73574badd9c5&ei=5087%0AChina’s

True Dash of Flavor

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By FUCHSIA DUNLOP
Published: February 18, 2007

TODAY the Chinese Year of the Pig begins, and Americans across the country will venture to their local Chinatowns for a festive meal. Yet despite the enduring popularity of Chinese food, many still see it as strictly a down-market cuisine, more the stuff of cheap takeout than one of the world’s great culinary cultures. In the old days of chop suey and egg foo yung, this reputation may have been justified, but now that fine and authentic Chinese dining is available in the United States (if you know where to look for it), why do so many people still think of it as junky?

Looming large as an explanation is the use of monosodium glutamate, or MSG, in Chinese kitchens. For restaurant chefs and Chinese home cooks, MSG is a ubiquitous seasoning, considered as “normal” as salt, soy sauce and vinegar. Yet for many Americans, the fine white powder is a sinister food additive, tainted by association with industrialized food production and the garish, over-the-top flavors of packaged snacks.

And, ever since 1968, when The New England Journal of Medicine used the headline “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome” over a letter from a doctor complaining that Chinese restaurant food gave him numbness in his neck and palpitations, it has also been fingered with medical suspicion.

While around a third of Americans say they believe that MSG makes them ill, reputable medical studies have shown that only a tiny proportion of people truly react to it, and then only when it is administered in large oral doses on an empty stomach. All this was explained, and the restaurant syndrome fully debunked, in great detail by the food writer Jeffrey Steingarten in a 1999 essay for Vogue magazine titled “Why Doesn’t Everybody in China Have a Headache?”

In the absence of medical evidence of any harmful physiological effects of MSG, the fact that the Chinese use it while Americans not of Chinese descent generally don’t creates a serious cultural barrier to the mainstream appreciation of Chinese food. Isn’t it time, perhaps, to cast off our prejudices and take a cool, steady look at MSG?

MSG is not, of course, a traditional Chinese seasoning. It was discovered in 1908 by a Japanese scientist, Kikunae Ikeda, who was trying to pinpoint the source of the intense deliciousness of broth made from kombu seaweed. In his laboratory, he isolated the natural glutamates in the seaweed, and to their marvelous taste he gave the name “umami,” derived from the Japanese word for “delicious.” His work led directly to the industrial manufacture in Japan and then worldwide of MSG.

Still, MSG was long considered simply to be a flavor enhancer, with little or no taste of its own. In recent years, however, there has been growing acceptance of the existence of a so-called fifth taste — an addition to the traditional quartet of sweet, sour, salty and bitter — known through an emerging consensus by Ikeda’s term, umami. Our tongues, biologists have shown, have distinct receptors that pick up on the taste of MSG and a wider family of umami compounds, and some of our brain cells respond specifically to umami.

The umami taste comes from the building blocks of proteins, amino acids and nucleotides, which include not only glutamates but also inosinates and guanylates. These delicious molecules appear when animal and vegetable proteins break down, for example in the ripening of Parmigiano cheese or prosciutto di Parma. Industrially made MSG is a chemically “neat” form of one of the umami compounds that delight our taste buds when they occur naturally in cheese, ham andseaweed, just as salt is a “neat” form of the saltiness of seawater and white sugar of the sweetness of sugar cane. Is it any worse for us than refined salt and sugar?

Western chefs, food writers and consumers are only now cottoning onto the existence of umami and its power as a culinary concept. In China, however, it has long been part of the daily vocabulary of the kitchen. Chinese chefs talk often of “xian wei” — their term for umami. They use many ingredients that are naturally rich in it — Yunnan ham, dried scallops and shiitake mushrooms — to enhance the flavors of their stocks and sauces (just as an Italian cook might use grated Parmigiano or truffles to enhance the umami taste of a dish of pasta). They talk of “ti xian wei” (“bringing out the umami”) in their cooking through the judicious application of salt, sugar, chicken fat and, nowadays, MSG.

Bad Chinese chefs, of course, just use MSG as a substitute for good ingredients and properly made stocks, just as bad American food companies cook up snack foods made from fat and carbohydrates laced with salt and sugar. But top Chinese chefs also use it, to refine and elevate flavors. There may be no need to add MSG to a delicate soup made from chicken, ham and dried scallops. But in some culinary contexts, it works wonders: a little MSG mixed with salt and sesame oil can lift the flavor of a simple bamboo shoot salad, or add a dash of ecstasy to a stir-fry of pea shoots and garlic. If you didn’t know it was MSG, you would simply find it delicious.

In the past, I was as closed-minded on the subject of MSG as the purists and hypochondriacs. When I started cooking and writing about Chinese food more than a decade ago, I decided not to use MSG. I wanted to stick up for proper ingredients and traditional cooking methods, and help to rehabilitate the reputation of Chinese cuisine by showing that it didn’t require this reviled additive.

But these days I’m not so sure. The scientific evidence for umami is persuasive, and as a concept it makes sense of a great deal of traditional culinary theory. I see brilliant chefs in China making subtle and skillful use of MSG. And if some outstanding Western chefs — like Heston Blumenthal, whose Fat Duck restaurant in England has three Michelin stars — are willing to risk ridicule and experiment with its culinary potential, perhaps it’s time I should as well. Intellectual curiosity is, tradition has it, a hallmark of the Year of the Pig.

Fuchsia Dunlop is the author of “Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook.”

*CheerLeader*Mao
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Posted: Feb 19, 2007 - 02:03 PM

Using msg is disgusting and the sign of a lazy and incompentent chef. It is clearly a tool of the japanese to try and control the minds of chinese.

canuckyyz

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Posted: Feb 19, 2007 - 02:25 PM

Fuchsia Dunlop is also the author of "Land Of Plenty". It is an excellent Sichuan recipe book. The results are much more authentic Chwan-tsai than you might get at South Beauty. I ate MSG laced lunch 5 times a week for a year when I lived in Beijing and so far so good. Is there any documented evidence about the health effects of MSG?

splitsecond
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Posted: Feb 19, 2007 - 07:35 PM

the "down market" designation usually has to do with decor and service of most chinese restaurants. even top chinese restaurants in SF are generally cavernous, loud and boisterous places with bad service. places like shanghai 1930 that has ambiance and service the equal of nicer "upmarket" western restaurants has a very different feel.

johnqh

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Posted: Feb 19, 2007 - 09:53 PM

I am all for not using any flavor enhancer, and to be fair, people and restaurants should stop using oil for fries.

...come on, how lazy and incompentent (and unhealthy) can it be to dump some potatoes in boiling oil as food?

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Swiss-James

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Posted: Feb 20, 2007 - 01:13 PM

johnqh wrote:

I am all for not using any flavor enhancer, and to be fair, people and restaurants should stop using oil for fries.

How would you make them then?

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johnqh

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Posted: Feb 20, 2007 - 01:16 PM

Swiss-James wrote:

johnqh wrote:

I am all for not using any flavor enhancer, and to be fair, people and restaurants should stop using oil for fries.

How would you make them then?

Stop eating them! Wink

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*CheerLeader*Mao
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Posted: Feb 20, 2007 - 02:22 PM

canuckyyz wrote:

I dont think it affects everyone, but certainly loading your body and brain with food laced with a nurotransmitter designed to trick your brain into making food taste better isn't a healthy alternative.

MSG isn't a spice, it isn't a herb, it acts more like a drug on your brain making the food taste better than it is. It actually has no taste itself. And most people, even chinese complain of headaches, stomach aches and the MSG buzz effect. You think the noise and carrying on in a chinese restaurant, like a pack of kids given coca cola and cake is just a coincidence?

Its like anything, some people have a certain drug (nyqil, tylenol, marijuna, morphine) and certain doses affect them and certain doses don't affect others. Does that mean they are safe and don't have adverse side effects?

Or is there something to the commonplace complaints of rage, depression, unhappiness etc. that we see in the population here. Or the huge increase in Attention Deficit Syndrome, Asthma and the like in children over the last 30 to 40 years since MSG has been put into the food supply.

Simply biology really, what you put into your body, is what will come out. You are what you eat.

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Posted: Feb 20, 2007 - 06:17 PM

CheerleaderMao- I think you need to lay off the lead piping for a while- you post a magazine article debunking the whole MSG myth, and then start banging on about how bad it obviously is for you.

Quote:

Or is there something to the commonplace complaints of rage, depression, unhappiness etc. that we see in the population here. Or the huge increase in Attention Deficit Syndrome, Asthma and the like in children over the last 30 to 40 years since MSG has been put into the food supply.

Why stop there? Other things that are new in the last 30 to 40 years include- Colour television, the Macarena, mini-skirts, "Frasier" and heated towel rails. They're probably all caused by MSG too!
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*CheerLeader*Mao
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Posted: Feb 20, 2007 - 08:13 PM

johnqh

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Posted: Feb 20, 2007 - 11:50 PM

Oh, by the way, let's stop drinking coffee and tea too, and certainly alcohol since they all can effect the biology of human at some point..... Wait, I bet if you would die if you have too much salt, so let's stop eating salt too.

Also, I wasn't aware the "commonplace complaints of rage, depression, unhappiness etc" is more a problem in China and Japan (where the MSG is commonly used) than the States. Or is it the other way around?

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dannyboy

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Posted: Feb 26, 2007 - 10:47 AM

Cheerleader eats only beef, usually in the form of burgers, from RC and more often than not, City (Shitty) Diner.

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Posted: Feb 26, 2007 - 03:17 PM

hey, leave City Diner alone! I like that place

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dannyboy

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Posted: Feb 27, 2007 - 12:10 PM

Sorry. I do too.

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Posted: Mar 06, 2007 - 10:00 AM

Reading Fuchsia Dunlop's article was mildly upsetting for me but not for the reason you might think. I became interested in glutamate research while researching a book on a related topic, and have seriously considered writing a freelance article about MSG/umami that would have made most of the same points that Dunlop made.

Speaking as someone with 2 university degrees in biology, who has actually read a lot of technical papers on MSG including the original one from the 1950s which led to the whole glutamate toxicity theory on the first place, the idea that MSG is harmful, in moderation, has been debunked just about as thoroughly as any public health theory can ever be.

What is interesting to me is how many cultures have independently discovered the substance's flavor enhancing effects: in China, soy sauce and oyster sauce both are general flavor enhancers primarily because they contain large amounts of dissolved glutamate. Same for nuoc mam, the Vietnamese fermented fish sauce. In Europe, sharp cheeses like parmesan, often used to boost flavor, are also the cheeses which contain the most glutamate. Condiments as diverse as Worcestershire sauce, Maggi and even ketchup (read the recent New Yorker article before you knock it) also owe much to glutamate.

It's not surprising that human taste buds respond to glutamate (and btw the idea that "it has no taste" is ludicrous - all you have to do to disprove that theory is taste a few crystals of it, it has a kind of meaty taste) - after all, nutritionally, humans need carbohydrate and salt, so they have taste sensors for both those substances, as well as a bitterness sensor to avoid dangerous chemicals. Since we need protein also, why shouldn't we have a protein sensor as well?

What's surprising is that this wasn't discovered earlier, and that so many textbooks have said for decades that we can detect four tastes (sweet, sour, salty and bitter) when actually we can detect five - the fifth being umami, or MSG.

In my, i would like to think, fairly well informed opinion, anybody who avoids MSG on the grounds that it is unhealthy is simply punishing themselves for no good reason. The fact is that most people who disdain MSG do so because opposition to its use fits well with a general anti-science, self-flagellating tendency that is very fashionable in certain elements of western culture (you know who you are). To anyone who is interested in the world of reality where beliefs are supported by actual evidence, there is no good cause for abstaining from MSG, or fretting unduly over its presence.

In China and elsewhere in Asia (like Vietnam, where MSG is treated as just another condiment), the local people deploy MSG massively and increasingly deftly to enhance the flavor of food, much as they have been doing for millennia with fermented protein hydrolysates like soy sauce, which are naturally rich in the chemical. Who are we, as safety-obsessed westerners, to demand that they stop? Especially when our own scientists have already proved them right?