Chef Dad: Now MSG Free!

One of the things about knowing your way around a kitchen, is that everyone wants to bend your ear about food.

 “I’m making this recipe, it calls for A but I only have B. Can I use it?”

“I bought this roast on sale at the butcher but have never made it before. Help!”

“I’m having company and can’t think of a second side dish. Any ideas?”

You get the idea… and that’s part of what I love about cooking. Anyway, recently someone asked me about Umami. Does it just mean MSG is added? And well, that got me going off on a whole rant that could only be properly captured in a Chef Dad post.

So, here’s the 101, and some important things to know – Umami is a Japanese term that means savouriness or meatiness (think beef, cheese, mushrooms). It is one of the human mouth’s basic tastes along with bitter, salty, sweet, and sour. 

A great dish tantalizes your mouth by being well balanced in multiple flavours. If you close your eyes and think of your favourite food, odds are it has a good balance of the basic tastes. My favourite dish, Died & Gone to Heaven Ribs, is sweet, salty and of course meaty.

Anyhow, our brains tend to like food a lot more when they have this 5th basic taste, umami. The easiest way to attain this artificially is with Monosodium Glutamate (MSG). And there’s the rub.

MSG is a salt produced via the bacterial fermentation of carbohydrates. It’s a favourite of Chinese restaurants and many other fast food joints. If you spend a few minutes reading labels at the grocery store you’ll find it in sauces, soup bouillon, salad dressing, and many snack foods.

While the FDA refuses to recognize anything specifically harming in MSG, people are clearly affected by it. Many complain of light headedness or migraine-like headaches shortly after ingesting MSG. I always joke that I could be used as an MSG canary, as within minutes of eating MSG-laden food the room is spinning as if ‘d just downed a couple shots of Jagermeister. So while it’s not necessarily on the “you should absolutely not eat it list”, do you really want to be pumping your kids full of it on a regular basis?

So, you say, I’ll be sure to avoid MSG foods in our diet. No worries, right?…..

Well, recently I made soup with chicken stock in it. I made sure to use a product that proudly declared “MSG Free!” on the side of the box. However, sure enough, minutes after eating dinner I was so lightheaded I didn’t want to stand up. What gives? Once I looked at the ingredients of the soup mix, the only item I couldn’t identify was Yeast Extract. Following some research I discovered that Yeast Extract does the exact same thing as MSG. The food industry loves it because they can proudly write ‘MSG Free!’ on their products while still attaining the same result.

The internet is abound with arguments on both sides of the fence as to the relative safety (argued for by the food industry) or risks of consuming MSG. I won’t go into the specifics here, and I don’t claim to be an expert on the topic. At the end of the day, I like to cook & eat food that is good for me and my family.

As someone who is affected by MSG, I now know that I need to avoid both MSG & Yeast Extract when I pull products off the shelf in the grocery store.

I hope this helps!