Hi everyone, welcome to Cold-Knowledge Blind Box.

Legend has it that there is a lingering nightmare on your dinner table, and its name is MSG.

Your fear of it is innate, with no reason and no cause.

Chemical, synthetic, cheap: grown-ups usually only need to throw out these three labels, and MSG becomes a fear that lives forever in your heart.

But in fact, is MSG really that scary?

Seventeen years ago, Dr. Ian Mosby of York University in Canada spent three years investigating and concluded that MSG was the modern crystallization of Japan, the shining star of China's national industry. Later, though, it became a scientific disgrace in the West.

Why are you afraid of MSG? That isn't a scientific question. It's a serious social problem...

So what secret did Professor Mosby uncover?

Today, let's talk about this story.

1908 · The Strange Kombu

Let's go back to 1908, when a strange bowl of kelp soup caught the attention of Professor Ikeda Kikunae.

He noticed that the kelp soup his wife had made that day was different from usual. It had a subtle, pleasant saltiness. When he looked closer, he found that she had used a lot more kelp in the broth today.

Ikeda was a chemistry professor at the University of Tokyo, and he had spent two years studying in Germany.

So, following the research habits of German scientists, he immediately realized that this pleasant saltiness must be connected to the extra kelp in some intrinsic way.

He asked his wife, "Don't you think today's soup is special? It has a pleasant saltiness that's hard to describe."

She replied, "Isn't that just the taste of kelp? Is something wrong with it?"

"Hmm," said Professor Ikeda, pressing his lips together. "This flavor should probably be called umami." He coined the word himself, combining umai, meaning delicious or tasty, with mi, meaning flavor.

His wife smiled politely, and Professor Ikeda went on: "Could you buy a bit more of this kelp at the market tomorrow? I want to study the secret of this umami..."

Sure enough, the next day, Professor Ikeda carried over 100 jin of kelp into his chemistry lab. Kelp is a large brown seaweed. You could say it's the more refined name for haidai.

For example, Li Shizhen's Compendium of Materia Medica records seaweed, kelp, kombu and lunbu, a group of plants in the kelp family that are hard to tell apart.

Next, Professor Ikeda wrote the first finding in his lab notes. While buying kelp, he had heard from many kelp shop owners, "Oh, you're looking for umami? Then whatever you do, don't wash the kelp! The white powder that forms on it is the source of the flavor. That powder might be the umami itself."

So Professor Ikeda suspected that umami was a natural crystalline product of kelp, and he decided to purify it by crystallization.

Crystallization was a fairly cutting-edge chemical method at the time. As luck would have it, during his two years in Germany, Ikeda had been studying crystallization under Dr. Wilhelm Ostwald, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1909.

Meanwhile, back in Japan, Ikeda published a paper on umami in 1909.

In this paper, Professor Ikeda first described in detail how he extracted just over 30 grams of crystals from more than 60 jin of kelp. Then he showed that these 30-odd grams of crystals were very pure glutamic acid, and that glutamic acid was the true source of umami.

He went further in the paper and predicted that umami was a fifth taste sense for humans, beyond sour, sweet, bitter and salty.

At the time, English and other Western languages had no word that could accurately describe this taste, so they simply adopted the name umami for this fifth taste.

In Chinese, umami was translated as 鲜味 (xianwei, "freshness").

Decades later, in 2000, scientists finally confirmed Professor Ikeda's prediction: human taste buds do have receptors for umami, making it the fifth taste.

So this paper was considered a major event at the time. The academic world saw it as one of the signs that Japanese science was on the rise. Professor Ikeda, however, did not become arrogant. He set out to use his umami theory to do something big...

Developing MSG

While publishing his paper, Professor Ikeda had already started work on developing MSG.

The process was like attaching a clasp to glutamic acid. Glutamic acid is like a Lego block with no snap on it. To make it crystallize, you have to attach a clasp to it.

These clasps are commonly called metal cations. But which metal is the best?

Professor Ikeda tried one metal after another: ammonium, magnesium, zinc, aluminum, copper, iron and so on. But every one of them left a strange metallic taste.

In the end, he settled on sodium. After all, table salt is sodium chloride, and we are used to the salty taste of the sodium ion.

So Professor Ikeda used kelp and sodium hydroxide (NaOH) to make the world's first bag of MSG.

Once he had confirmed monosodium glutamate, he developed a method for mass-producing it from kelp, wheat and soybeans, and he patented it. He then teamed up with Suzuki (Saburosuke Suzuki II), the second-generation head of a pharmaceutical company.

The two of them founded a brand-new MSG company and named it Ajinomoto, a Japanese name meaning "the origin of flavor."

But, to their surprise, Ajinomoto met with a Waterloo in Japan.

The reason was that Japan had a tradition of craftsmen passing down their skills. As in Seven Samurai, where firearms face swordsmen, this felt like a humiliation of the times.

Compared with traditional craftsmen's broths, Professor Ikeda's Ajinomoto was like a gun to a sword.

So food artisans boycotted it: "How can you use this chemically synthesized thing to replace the traditions we've kept for thousands of years?"

Before long, a newspaper even ran an article titled "Ajinomoto Is a Green Grand General," where "green grand general" is a common name for the Japanese rat snake. The author was Miyatake Gaikotsu, one of the most famous investigative journalists in Japan's press at the time.

Miyatake said that, according to his investigation, the Ajinomoto company was recruiting snake catchers on a large scale, using snake meat as a raw material. Because production was so big, it even had plans to build new snake farms.

Public opinion erupted. At one point, Ajinomoto even took out a newspaper ad swearing, "Before heaven, we swear Ajinomoto contains no snake meat!"

But did Ajinomoto really use snake meat?

The story is subtle. While Suzuki and Ikeda were being beaten up in Japan, they looked to China. And so Ajinomoto's marketing in China went something like this...

1918 · Shanghai

In 1918, Ajinomoto set up a company in Shanghai and became an instant hit.

A beauty on the label, a clear little bottle, and it was marketed as a rare seasoning delicacy in the world.

There were even rumors on the streets that this mysterious white powder was ground from precious snake bones...

The Chinese were not especially squeamish about snake meat, and they didn't mind guilds of artisans or firearms either. So within a few years, Ajinomoto had become the rage across Shanghai.

There was even a black market where it traded for half a liang of gold per box.

Ajinomoto made a fortune in China. Then branches opened in Hong Kong, Shenyang and Taiwan. In Taiwan especially, many vendors put Ajinomoto packaging tins in the most prominent spots to show that their food was genuinely delicious.

According to historical records from the Taiwan Nichinichi Shinpo newspaper, many vendors could not actually afford Ajinomoto. So they bought empty Ajinomoto packaging boxes at high prices, filled them with homemade taro powder, fish bones and salt, and sprinkled this on diners' food for show. That shows how hot Ajinomoto was.

But the good times didn't last. In 1921, a brilliant chemist appeared in Shanghai. His name was Wu Yunchu.

Wu Yunchu came from a family of scholars in Jiading County, Shanghai, for three generations. As a boy he was a talented student of the Four Books and Five Classics. But at the age of 14, in 1905, the Guangxu Emperor suddenly issued an edict abolishing the imperial examinations.

So Wu switched course. He began teaching himself English, French, astronomy and arithmetic. At 17, he passed the entrance exam for chemical engineering and, after graduating, was assigned to work at the Jiangnan Arsenal in Shanghai.

At this time, Wu was 30. He saw how hot Ajinomoto was in Shanghai, so he decided to break the monopoly and develop a Chinese version of Ajinomoto.

The research went smoothly. Wu quickly found through testing that Ajinomoto contained only one ingredient: monosodium glutamate.

On further investigation, Wu discovered that monosodium glutamate was not first discovered by Professor Ikeda. Back in 1866, a German chemist named Karl Heinrich Ritthausen had first extracted it from wheat gluten, but since Western eating habits were different, the compound was not turned into a product at that time.

Wu also found that Dr. Ritthausen had predicted that glutamic acid was an amino acid widely present in grains.

So, Wu wondered, since Ajinomoto extracted glutamic acid from kelp, soybeans and fish, could he extract it directly from barley and flour?

With that in mind, Wu designed a method that simulated the human digestive system.

The principle goes roughly like this. In the human body, when grain is eaten and reaches the stomach, stomach acid breaks down the grain protein, and the glutamic acid in that protein is released. If this process could be simulated outside the body, Wu could obtain free glutamic acid, and then crystallize it with sodium hydroxide to get monosodium glutamate.

At the time, Wu still had a day job, so he could only research in his spare time. He built a lab in his own home, with his wife, Mrs. Wu, acting as his lab assistant the whole time.

Wu's plan was clear. First, dry the wheat gluten and grind it into powder. Then put the powder into hydrochloric acid to simulate stomach digestion. The simulation generally needed dozens of hours. So during the day, Mrs. Wu ran experiments at home under different conditions and recorded the data.

At night, she and Wu analyzed and summarized the data together, then planned the next day's experiments.

Sure enough, after a whole year of experiments, Wu found the best simulation method. The monosodium glutamate he produced was of quality absolutely equal to Ajinomoto's, and its production cost was less than one silver dollar per 100 grams, which was also highly competitive in the market.

So Wu renamed his product, taking the meaning "the essence of flavor" and calling it, simply, weijing (味精), or "MSG."

Next, industrialist Zhang Yiyun joined Wu, and together they founded Tianchu Company, which began producing MSG in 1921 and went head to head with Ajinomoto in the market.

Tianchu's MSG used a Buddha's Hand trademark, symbolizing a treasure bestowed by the heavenly Buddha.

Ajinomoto, by contrast, used a beauty trademark, promoting itself as a delicacy of the human world.

Compared with Ajinomoto, Wu's Buddha's Hand MSG had another big selling point: it was extracted entirely from plant protein, so vegetarians had nothing to worry about.

Ajinomoto's raw materials at the time included various fish and animal proteins. That made its extraction more expensive, and it was unfriendly to the large numbers of Buddhists and vegetarians in China.

As a result, by 1923 Buddha's Hand MSG had reached an annual output of 3,000 tons and started to compete on equal terms with Beauty Brand Ajinomoto.

Then, with Buddha's Hand MSG waving the banner of a national product, and with the patriotic movements of that era, Ajinomoto quickly lost ground in the market.

By 1926, Wu, with the help of ambassadors from Britain, France and the United States, had secured patent protection in all three countries. He began exporting in large volumes, and not only defeated Ajinomoto again in Southeast Asian markets, but also opened up sales in Europe and America, continuing to compete with Ajinomoto there.

Then, in the 1940s, MSG found its way onto Western tables in a rather unexpected way.

1941 · The Pacific War

In 1941, the Pacific War broke out, and the United States and Japan clashed fiercely across the Pacific.

But at this point, the American military discovered a problem. Why did American soldiers prefer the Japanese army rations they had captured? Were they giving up on Coca-Cola altogether?

The military launched an investigation, and it turned out the Japanese rations contained MSG.

MSG not only adds savoriness, it also stimulates appetite. This is because the human gastrointestinal tract also has glutamate receptors. Once the gut detects a large amount of glutamate coming in, it sends a signal to the brain: high-protein food is invading, so please switch on berserk mode immediately.

So the brain goes wild. Your body not only eats more, but also gets happier the more it eats. That is what we call the pleasure of umami, and in truth it is a side effect of the brain's berserk mode.

There is also a study showing why we enjoy the pleasure that glutamate brings...

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