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Well, this is a series about something

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that appears in food all over our society.

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It's a little bit of a brighter white,
a little bit more fine grained.

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It's in grocery
stores. It's in restaurants.

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It's everywhere.

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Doritos.

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Any kind of flavored potato chips.

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Any kind of microwave dinner
or prepared sauce.

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Condiments.

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In fact, it's so common that most
people don't even know they're eating it.

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Then it looks a little bit like a drug.

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I'll just be super honest.

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It's called monosodium glutamate or MSG.

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MSG is monosodium glutamate.

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To me, it's

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It's savory salt.

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It's another flavoring,
it's another spice.

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If you consider umami like

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one of the five tastes now,
it does make everything delicious.

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Just like you need salt in everything,
otherwise you won't taste the spices.

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MSG has this history of being

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bad for you and just like consuming
any amount of it could be bad.

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But you know, studies have shown now
that, like, in the amount that we consume,

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it's not dangerous.

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The rough scientific canon
is that there are five basic tastes

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sweet, salty, bitter, sour.

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And then recently it's been agreed
upon in the 21st century

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that we have a fifth taste
called umami.

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And evidence for that was that
we identified these unique molecular

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receptors for glutamate
and it was called umami.

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Glutamate is naturally occurring
and we can identify

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large amounts of glutamate in foods
that are used the world around,

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like mushrooms
and aged cheese and tomatoes.

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Human breast milk was the clincher.

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I was watching a food show.

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It was a throwaway comment. The host said.

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Yeah, the whole controversy over
MSG started with one

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letter to the New England
Journal of Medicine in 1968.

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I was like,

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What?

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One letter?

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To the editor,

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for several years, since I have been
in this country, I've experienced

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a strange syndrome whenever
I have eaten out in a Chinese restaurant.

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In the original letter,

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Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok, he identifies
himself as a medical professional.

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He says, I'm from China.

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And there's this weird thing that happens

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whenever I go to Chinese
restaurants only in the U.S.

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He says, I get this weird sort of headache.

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Sometimes I feel a little tingly.

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Oh, well, maybe it's the cooking wine.

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Maybe I'm having a bad reaction to that.

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And at the very end of the
letter he says, and

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you know, maybe it's the
presence of monosodium glutamate.

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The responses were mildly racist.

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They were satirical,
but not very good satire.

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This one letter

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and all of these really
humorous comedic responses

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somehow spawned this myth that MSG

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is bad for you.

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Lucky Danger and MSG

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were never going to happen
without each other.

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It was never a consideration
not to use MSG.

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It would be just like a consideration
of opening a French restaurant

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without butter.

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I've always known that MSG has
been around. And being classically

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French trained, because there was
no Chinese culinary schools,

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it was always kind of
like a trick in the bag.

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But now it's like front and center

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in my professional cooking
because pretty much everything

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I've touched since the pandemic
has been around Chinese food.

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And that's been a very intentional choice.

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I never want to say that

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Lucky Danger is redefining
Chinese food in America.

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It's really just updating it
because it hasn't

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been updated since the Chinese restaurant
syndrome thing was happening.

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My uncle very much falls into

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the Chinese restaurant
syndrome. So his restaurant

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and his cooking to this day
still wears the badge of no MSG.

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That's always been a funny conversation
just because we come from

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two different generations,
but both in the restaurant industry.

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When he ran a restaurant,
MSG was a way to lose your business.

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This moment of MSG

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becoming this sort of scary object
is tied into a longer history

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of Chinese food generally
being thought of as dirty as lesser.

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If you go back to the 1800s,
Chinese restaurants were considered

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basically co-equal with opium dens
and places where people preyed

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on the young, innocent white citizens

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of this country.

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But the term Chinese restaurant syndrome

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actually came in
some of the later responses

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to Dr. Kwok’s letter.

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It really wasn't

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until the news articles
that picked this up

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and started running with it that you see
the zeroing in and the focus on MSG.

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It's the late 1960s.

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People are really suspicious of things
like saccharin and, you know, DDT.

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And you have this substance
that is called monosodium glutamate.

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It doesn't sound very safe.

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So MSG hit a nerve.

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Not only because of these cultural
biases, but because of

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a general increase in alarm
around food contamination.

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And it hit this note
in American culture of

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who gets to be American.

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This was also precisely a moment
in which the environmental movement

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in the United States and consumer
activism around food labels,

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against industrial additives
in consumer products and foods.

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There was a whole bunch
of new environmental regulations

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that were put into place in the
late sixties and early seventies

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that had never existed before.

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The Clean Water Act.

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Seatbelts in cars.

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That regulation was put in place
by the same consumer advocate

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who took the debate around MSG
safety to Congress, Ralph Nader.

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And without information easily
accessible to the consumer

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and without permitting the aggrieved
consumer of practical remedies in law,

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the market system becomes a fraud.

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There was awareness of oh wait,
there are things added to foods

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that have scary chemical names
that we need to actually be researching

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because they might have effects
that we don't understand.

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Prepared meats inspected
and passed by the United States

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Department of Agriculture are clean, safe,

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wholesome and truthfully labeled.

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Lucky Danger's roots

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are back in my family's history.

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Right before the pandemic in 2019,

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my uncle and I and our entire family's
history was inducted

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into the Smithsonian's
American History Museum.

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Just because Chinese food has played

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such a important and
pivotal role in food in America.

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After that event,

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the pandemic was already in
America, and it really hit like

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three or four months later

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and it decimated the restaurant industry.

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During a time where
there was takeout only.

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You would think that Chinese
businesses would have thrived.

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But the given climate of anti-Asian hate

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really hurt Chinese businesses.

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The pandemic had allowed
me and pretty much

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everybody to slow down
and look at like what's important.

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I think it's really to just like
introduce culture

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through food.

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Especially given

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the anti-Asian hate events and incidents
and rhetoric that's happened over time.

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It’s very important now to make sure
that there's an opposing message to be said.

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I feel like food is one of the areas

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where misinformation is extremely powerful.

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Because you're talking about something
that you take into the body,

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that transforms your body
as you eat it.

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If you think about some of the less overt
things that we say about Chinese food,

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right, you eat Chinese food and
then you're hungry an hour later.

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You could look at that
scientifically and say, well,

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maybe you're filling up on fried rice
and you're eating like simple carbs

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for your entire meal.

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But what happens is
that turns into shorthand for, oh

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Chinese food, Asian food,

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it's just not nutritious.

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The anti-Asian hate in relation
to COVID and the idea

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oh, well, clearly
all of you people eat bats.

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It's just a slightly different
manifestation of the same sort of thing.

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When we opened as a pop up

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in Washington, D.C.,

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we didn't tell anybody that we used MSG,

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but we used it very, very heavily.

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When Lucky Danger opened,
it opened to a lot of critical success

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and just everybody being like,
Oh, what's so good about it?

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Actually, we came to Arlington
and we trained a new staff.

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We were getting very poor feedback.

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Nothing else changed in terms
of how we thought we were doing it.

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And then when we took a deeper dive,
we found out that

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MSG was being omitted.

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When we reintroduced MSG here
after several weeks,

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like everything just kind of took a turn.

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Is this actually good for you?

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Should I actually be eating this?

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And it's such a riddle.

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I think that there is reason for us
to have more nuanced understanding of MSG

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and umami now, because
we have more research about

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how taste sensation
works throughout the body.

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I don't think that it's sufficient
explanation to just say,

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well, we knew less then. A whole bunch of
people told a whole bunch of lies

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about MSG being bad for you.

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And now we know it's totally fine and good
and there is nothing else to say.

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So if someone genuinely believes

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that MSG gives them headaches
or gastro side effects,

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then I have time for that.

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Because we all have to live
in our own bodies

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and no one else is going
to take care of your body.

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I think the biggest thing
people should take away

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is that MSG is not a scary ingredient.

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But also more broadly
that there aren't a lot of actually scary

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ingredients in food.

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Food is very personal.

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Food is very individual.

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And I think you have the freedom
to be experimental.

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I would just say, as someone
who works with words in arguments,

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ask yourself whose voice is in my head
when I'm telling myself

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I shouldn't eat this?

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I think an easy introduction is to,
in one of your dishes,

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it doesn't have to be a Chinese
dish, is to replace your salt

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with MSG and see what it does.

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There are still some that

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will come in to the shop and
be like, do you use MSG?

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And we’re like, yes we use MSG.
And they’re like

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can you leave it out?
And like we can.

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We prefer not to.
And then they just walk out.

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And to a certain degree
you just accept that,

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you know, maybe
that's just not your customer.

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And we don't want
to put our version of the food out,

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that's not our version.

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My uncle ate here

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for the first time when we
were just like filming a bit.

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And we actually have him on camera eating it.
And he’s like, just he kept eating it.

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He's like, you know what

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what do you do?

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I was just like, it's
probably the MSG Uncle Paul.

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And he’s just like, don't tell anybody.

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The attitudes we have toward food,

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positive or negative,
are wrapped up in a whole

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bunch of other things
that are really hard to tease apart.

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But I think we need to try.

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I think we need to say, where did you get
the idea that this is a good food

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and this is a bad food?

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I hope that as we talk more about
food and identity and culture,

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we can have those bigger conversations.