四海为家

I cooked a version of Sichuanese fish last night, and if I hadn’t destroyed the dish by adding much too much chili, it would have been perfect save for one missing ingredient: MSG. I couldn’t find it in the supermarket, and when I tried to google places in London to buy it, I instead found only hate against this supposedly dangerous chemical. The word does sound scary in English — it sounds like something produced in a chemistry lab — while the Swedish word, glutamat, sounds slightly more benign, and the Chinese word, 味精, sounds positively delicious. A case of language leading practice perhaps? Either way, as far as I can tell, the idea that MSG is dangerous is more or less a myth — like salt, probably not healthy in large amounts, but otherwise not particularly poisonous. The supposed dangers of MSG have apparently been thoroughly debunked, but the fear somehow manages to live on in the English-speaking world. I wonder when and where the campaign against MSG began… maybe a shady world-wide Freemason conspiracy against Chinese take-away?