Started by Yuki Tanabe (@yuki_reads) ·
MSG was discovered by a chemist trying to work out why dashi tastes so good
1908, Tokyo. Ikeda isolated glutamate from kombu broth, named the taste 'umami', and a businessman started selling it as Ajinomoto. It took most of the century, and the discovery of actual taste receptors for it, for umami to be widely accepted as a basic taste.
6 sources · 36 min down the hole
How I got here
- Started with
- “who invented msg”
- Ended at
- Glutamate flavoring
The Trail
- “who invented msg” (google.com)
- Kikunae Ikeda (en.wikipedia.org)
- Umami (en.wikipedia.org)
- Monosodium glutamate (en.wikipedia.org)
- Kombu (en.wikipedia.org)
- Glutamate flavoring (en.wikipedia.org)
the whole 'Chinese restaurant syndrome' scare traces back to one 1968 letter to a medical journal
What I came away with
Glutamate is naturally all over the place: tomatoes, parmesan, soy sauce, mushrooms. The MSG scare started with a 1968 letter that may well have been tongue-in-cheek, and later studies couldn't consistently reproduce the symptoms it described.
Keep going
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