At the grocery store I only see "MSG Free" labels on soy sauce, ramen, noodles, etc. but nothing for chips, burritos, burgers, etc.
I know there are people who dislike MSG, but the MSG scare was also racist scaremongering, and I wonder how many people think they dislike MSG because the media said Chinese food will kill them while gulping down a big mac and bag of doritos every day
There are no people that dislike MSG, only people that think they dislike it.
https://www.the-health-focus.com/2018/10/is-msg-addictive/
MSG has a sinister effect on the brain making it believe that food tastes better
Just cracking up at this sentence. It makes the brain "believe" that food tastes better. Did you know that you can trick your brain into thinking that your food is salty by putting salt in it? Next you'll be telling me that adding sugar to your food dupes your brain into thinking that you are consuming a source of energy.
adding red pigment to paint tricks the brain into thinking the paint looks redder.
:galaxy-brain:
As a Chinese person who's lived in the West, MSG-free labels are actually helpful because they tip me off as to which grocery items are shitty knock-off versions adjusted to Western tastes.
Incidentally, one of the surprising things I learned while living in Japan is that MSG is fucking everywhere in Japanese food, to the point where some okonomiyaki joints leave a shaker of it out on the table to use as seasoning alongside the salt and pepper. Despite that, I've never seen crackers complain about msg in Japanese food :thinking-about-it:
MSG is naturally found in kombu, which is used a lot in Japanese cooking. MSG was discovered by a Japanese biochemist working with kombu broth:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate
For me, when the wok comes out of the cabinet, so does the msg. Gotta follow those recipes to the letter.
MSG is fucking everywhere in Japanese food, to the point where some okonomiyaki joints leave a shaker of it out on the table
:panting:
Maybe that type of packaging is for people who are trying to shop for others. I know I have a friend with a gluten sensitivity so I try to buy things for him sometimes and honestly having the "Gluten-Free" label on things that would never have contained Gluten to begin with is sometimes helpful, I would imagine even more-so for someone who is doing that type of shopping for someone else for the first time.
The number of posts I've seen where the friend/boyfriend/whatever is like "omg, I didn't know X was in thing-that-requires-X!"
I also thought this before I got diagnosed with celiac. But there are a LOT of foods that are regularly contaminated with gluten in the manufacturing process. I have to call to check that things aren't made on shared manufacturing lines regularly. When a product says "gluten free" that gives a bare minimum legal level of responsibility to avoid contamination.
However, there was a Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok who worked at the National Biomedical Research Foundation, both names Steel claimed to have invented. Kwok’s children, his colleague at the research foundation, and the son of his boss there confirmed that Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok, who had died in 2014, wrote this letter. After hearing about Kwok’s family, Steel’s daughter Anna came to believe this claim itself was one of the last pranks by her late father
:mystery-emote:
The cracker's digestive tract cannot handle more than one seasoning at a time
Stopping institutional racism in medicine [Challenge: Fucking Impossible]
The only time I ever heard about MSG was someone saying that McDonalds puts it in their food to make it addictive. Never heard about it being connected to Chinese food tbh
I wonder how many people think they dislike MSG because the media said Chinese food will kill them while gulping down a big mac and bag of doritos every day
Almost anyone who thinks that, this is why even if they don't realize
I recently heard something that makes me wonder about peoples' self-confirmation of the supposed MSG sensitivity.
A lot of white people will order Asian food but avoid rice because of the carbs. So they order what is essentially a rice topping, which has the amount of salt necessary to balance out a large portion of completely unsalted rice. It's often very sweet, savory, and oily, so it doesn't taste as salty as it is.
This makes them feel like shit.
A lot of white people will order Asian food but avoid rice because of the carbs.
I once met a white weeb whose dream it was to live in Japan. He hated rice and refuses to eat it.
Good fucking luck to him. Probably got to japan and gushed about convenience store sandwiches for a week before dread set in.
MSG free food sounds like hell. Never seen that shit before in my life.
MSG racism is weird. I think it's been a thing my whole life but I don't know how it got started
The idea of MSG being bad basically came from a bunch of racist white idiots who would go to a Chinese restaurant, get headaches/other bad feelings a few days later for completely unrelated causes and then try to blame it on the food they ate a few days back because they were racist idiots. They even literally called it "Chinese restaurant syndrome".
This eventually spiraled into a full on hate for MSG and now it's hard to find in Asian American food and restaurants because so many customers are convinced it's bad they lose profits despite there being no good reason not to.
MSG is just like some sort of salt. It's sold as a "flavor enhancer". It's pretty inert stuff really. Except that it was revealed to me that MSG does very little if you put it in food that is already very savory, so you would typically use it to fix bland shit. I think people should be wary not of the side effects of MSG itself but that if MSG appears in a processed item with a bunch of other shit, then that means that a crapton of money went into making a bunch of cheaply-made fried tortilla chips with little to no nutritional value be as appealing to the human taste bud as humanly possible, and that's enough cause of concern to me, personally.
