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MUNK SCHOOL BRIEFINGS Comparative Program on Health and Society Lupina Foundation Working Paper Series, 2010–2011 Edited by Antony Chum and Lisa Forman Metabolising MSG: Tasting, Making, and Managing with Flavour Agent Monosodium Glutamate Sarah Tracy
MUNK SCHOOL BRIEFINGS
Metabolising MSG:
Tasting, Making, and Managing with
Flavour Agent Monosodium Glutamate
By
Sarah Tracy
Junior Doctoral Fellow, 2010-2011
PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Toronto
MUNK SCHOOL OF GLOBAL AFFAIRS
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTOMunk School of Global Affairs At Trinity College University of Toronto 1 Devonshire Place Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 3K7 Telephone: (416) 946-8900 Facsimile: (416) 946-8915 E-mail: munkschool@utoronto.ca Website: www.munkschool.utoronto.ca © Sarah Tracy 978-0-7727-0894-6 ISSN 1715-3484
The Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto seeks to be an internationally recognised leader in interdisciplinary academic research on global issues and to integrate research with teaching and public educa- tion. We place special emphasis on the fostering of innovative interdisciplinary knowledge through the exchange of ideas and research among academics as well as the public, private, and voluntary sectors. We are delighted to present this collection of research papers from the Comparative Program on Health and Society based on work that our fellows undertook during 2010–2011. Founded in the year 2000, the Comparative Pro- gram on Health and Society (CPHS) is a vital and growing research institute based at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. Generously funded by The Lupina Foundation, the CPHS supports innovative, interdisciplinary, comparative research on health, broadly defined through our extensive range of fellowships, which for 2010–2011 included CPHS Junior Doctoral Fellowships, CPHS Senior Doctoral Fellowships, Lupina/OGS Doctoral Fellowships, Post-Doctoral Top-Up Fellowships, and Research Associate Positions. Our program builds on the scholarly strengths of the University of Toronto in the social sciences, humanities, and public health. As the CPHS moves into its second decade, we have adopted a renewed vision of the social determinants of health which recognizes the complexity and interrelatedness of domestic, transnational, regional, and global factors that may impact on health conditions and access to health-related services within any country, including Canada. We recognize similarly that emerging and entrenched health inequalities may require policy-makers, communities, and researchers to grapple with challenging ethical, human rights, and social justice questions. We have accord- ingly expanded the thematic focus of the Comparative Program to accommodate research which specifically focuses on these definitional and operational challenges. The research papers you will read in this year’s collection reflect these themes, and demonstrate the variety, complexity, and importance of comparative health research. COMPARATIVE PROGRAM ON HEALTH AND SOCIETY Munk School of Global Affairs University of Toronto 1 Devonshire Place Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 3K7 Telephone: (416) 946-8891 Facsimile: (416) 946-8915 E-mail: cphs.munk@utoronto.ca Website: www.utoronto.ca/cphs The CPHS Working Papers Series The Comparative Program on Health and Society maintains a collection of academic papers which we call our Lupina Foundation Working Papers Series. These works can range from research papers to thought pieces; and from statistical analyses to historical case studies. Our series represents a snap-shot of the work being done by our Lupina Fellows, past and present. Taken together, our Working Papers Series encapsulates the wide-ranging approaches to the study of the social determinants of health. We hope that you will find the individual papers in our series thought-provoking and helpful.
M UNK S CHOOL B RIEFINGS
1. Bound to Follow? US Foreign Policy, International Reactions, and the New Complexities of Sovereignty.
By Louis W. Pauly.
September 2005 ISBN 0-7727-0825-5.
2. The Multilateral Agenda: Moving Trade Negotiations Forward.
By Sylvia Ostry.
November 2005 ISBN 0-7727-0822-3.
3. The Jerusalem Old City Initiative Discussion Document: New Directions for Deliberation and Dialogue.
By Michael Bell, Michael J. Molloy, John Bell and Marketa Evans.
December 2005 ISBN 07727-0823-1.
4. Comparative Program on Health and Society Lupina Foundation Working Papers Series 2004–2005.
Edited by Jillian Clare Cohen and Jennifer E. Keelan.
January 2006 ISBN 0-7727-0818-5.
5. Comparative Program on Health and Society Lupina Foundation Working Papers Series 2005-2006.
Edited by Jillian Clare Cohen and Lisa Forman.
October 2006 ISBN 0-7727-0829-0.
6. Darfur and Afghanistan: Canada’s Choices in Deploying Military Forces.
By Ambassador David S. Wright.
October 2006 ISBN 0-7727-0830-4.
7. Trade Advocacy Groups and Multilateral Trade Policy-Making of African States.
By Sylvia Ostry and Thomas Kwasi Tieku.
April 2007 ISBN 978-0-7727-0832-8.
8. Water Diversion, Export, and Canada-U.S. Relations: A Brief History.
By Frank Quinn.
August 2007 ISBN 978-0-7727-8054-6.
9. Intersubjectivity in Literary Narrative.
By Tomas Kubicek
October 2007 ISBN 978-0-7727-0834-2.
10. Comparative Program on Health and Society Lupina Foundation Working Papers Series 2006-2007.
Edited by Jillian Clare Cohen-Kohler and M. Bianca Seaton.
November 2007 ISBN 978-0-7727-0838-0.
11. A Model Act for Preserving Canada’s Waters. Canadian Water Issues Council in collaboration with the
Program On Water Issues.
February 2008 ISBN 978-0-7727-0839-7.
Loi type sur la protection de l’eau au Canada. Conseil sur les questions de l’eau au Canada en
collaboration avec le Programme sur les questions de l’eau.
Février 2008 ISBN 978-0-7727-0840-3.
12. The World’s First Anti-Americans: Canada as the Canary in the Global Mine.
By Richard Gwyn.
March 2008 ISBN 978-0-7727-0842-7.
13. Comparative Program on Health and Society Lupina Foundation Working Papers Series 2007-2009.
Edited by M. Bianca Seaton and Sara Allin.
April 2010 ISBN 978-0-7727-0844-1.
14. The Importance of Steel Manufacturing to Canada – A Research Study.
By Peter Warrian.
July 2010 ISBN 978-0-7727-0845-8
15. A Century of Sharing Water Supplies between Canadian and American Borderland Communities
By Patrick Forest.
October 2010 ISBN 978-0-7727-0846-5
16 Designing a No-Fault Vaccine-Injury Compensation Programme for Canada: Lessons Learned from an
International Analysis of Programmes
By Jennifer Keelan PhD, Kumanan Wilson MSc, FRCP(C)
February 2011 ISBN 978-0-7727-0847-217. Socio-economic Status and Child Health: What is the Role of Health Care Utilization?
By Sara Allin and Mark Stabile.
July 2011 ISBN 0-7727-0849-6
18. Policy Implications of Neighbourhood Effects on Health Research: Towards an Alternative to Poverty
Deconcentration.
By Antony Chum.
July 2011 ISBN 0-7727-0858-8
19. A Lifetime of Experience: Modelling Labour Market and Family Life Course Histories among Older Adults
in Britain.
By Laurie M. Corna.
July 2011 ISBN 0-7727-0850-2
20. The Corporatization of Sport, Gender and Development: Postcolonial IR Feminisms, Transnational Private
Governance and Global Corporate Social Engagement.
By Lyndsay M.C. Hayhurst.
July 2011 ISBN 0-7727-0859-5
21. Accountability in Health Care and the Use of Performance Measures.
By Seija K. Kromm.
July 2011 ISBN 0-7727-0857-1
22. Colonial Medicine, the Body Politic, and Pickering’s Mangle in the case of Hong Kong’s Plague Crisis of
1894.
By Meaghan Marian.
July 2011 ISBN 0-7727-0860-1
23. Ojibwe Activism, Harm Reduction and Healing in 1970s Kenora, Ontario: A Micro-history of Canadian
Settler Colonialism and Urban Indigenous Resistance.
By Krista Maxwell.
July 2011 ISBN 0-7727-0853-3
24. Spheres of Risk: Examining Targeted and Universal Approaches to Childhood Injury Prevention.
Author: Tanya Morton.
July 2011 ISBN 0-7727-0856-4
25. The Scope and Limits of Legal Intervention in Controversies Involving Biomedicine: A Legal History of
Vaccination and English Law (1813–1853).
By Ubaka Ogbogu.
July 2011 ISBN 0-7727-0861-8
26. A Mixed-Method Approach to Examining Physical Activity among Canadian Girls of South Asian
Ancestry in High School.
By Subha Ramanathan.
July 2011 ISBN 0-7727-0855-7
27. Abide with Me: A Story of Two Pandemics.
By Kate Rossiter and Rebecca Godderis.
July 2011 ISBN 0-7727-0851-9
28. Global Biopolitics and Emerging Infectious Disease.
By Sarah Sanford.
July 2011 ISBN 0-7727-0854-0
29. Re-visiting Traumatic Stress: Integrating Local Practices and Meanings in Explanatory Frameworks of
Trauma.
By Eliana Suarez.
July 2011 ISBN 0-7727-0852-6
30. Neighbourhood Effects on Family-to-Work Conflict and Distress.
By Marisa C. Young.
July 2011 ISBN 0-7727-0862-5
31. Armed Conflict Exposure, the Proliferation of Stress, and the Mental Health Adjustment of Immigrants
in Canada.
By Marie-Pier Joly.
November 2012 ISBN 0-7727-0893-9
vi32. Metabolising MSG: Tasting, Making, and Managing with Flavour Agent Monosodium Glutamate.
By Sarah Tracy.
November 2012 ISBN 0-7727-0894-6
33. Tuberculosis and Persons with Severe and Persistent Mental Illnesses: When (Treatment) Worlds Collide?.
By Diego S. Silva.
November 2012 ISBN 0-7727-0895-3
34. Reducing Social Inequalities in Health: The Role of Simulation Modeling in Evaluating the Impact of
Population Health Interventions.
By Brendan T. Smith.
November 2012 ISBN 0-7727-0896-0
35. Social Context and the Gendered Life Course: What Do They Offer Our Understanding of Socioeconomic
Inequalities in Health in Later Life?
By Laurie M. Corna.
November 2012 ISBN 0-7727-0897-7
36. The Implications of HIV Programming on Rural Girls’ Construction of Healthy and Productive
Relationships in Rural Malawi.
By Lauren Classen.
November 2012 ISBN 0-7727-0898-4
37. Safe Houses in Contact Zones: Race Politics, Place-making, and Ethno-specific AIDS Service
Organizations in Toronto.
By John Paul Catungal.
November 2012 ISBN 0-7727-0899-1
38. Ancestral Assumptions: An Epistemic and Ethical Critique of Evolutionary Medicine.
By Michael Cournoyea.
November 2012 ISBN 0-7727-0900-4
viiMetabolising MSG:
Tasting, Making, and Managing with
Flavour Agent Monosodium Glutamate
Sarah Tracy
Abstract
Originated in Japan at the turn of the twentieth century and exported through Southeast Asia, China, and
later the rest of the world, monosodium glutamate (MSG)’s history reflects a complex collision of local,
domestic, and global forces. A transnational biotechnology phenomenon, food additive, and alleged toxin
valued for its ability to increase the perceived tastiness of savoury foods, MSG is considered here in the U.S.
arena as a commodity and technology that reconfigures the metabolic possibilities of living creatures. In
light of long-standing allegations of MSG complicity in a range of neurological disorders, I consider what is
at stake in this billion dollar global commodity conjuring metabolic capacities as economic efficiencies.
I argue that MSG’s experience as an alleged dietary toxin suggests that the additive operates in much more
contingent, subjective, and unpredictable ways than its regulatory status as Generally Recognized as Safe
(GRAS) reflects.
Sarah Tracy is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. A business
administration and honours history graduate of the University of New Brunswick, Sarah researches the
politics of food, life, and health and debility in twentieth-century North America. Sarah holds a SSHRC CGS
Doctoral Fellowship and is a 2012-2013 Doctoral Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute of the
University of Toronto.
INTRODUCTION
In 1988, Chicago-based investment banker/hospital administrator Jack Samuels, a middle-aged man
suffering from symptoms of the neurodegenerative condition Alzheimer’s disease, read George Schwartz’s
exposé on the food additive monosodium glutamate (MSG), In Bad Taste: The MSG Syndrome: How
Monosodium Glutamate is a Major Cause of Treatable and Preventable Illnesses, such as Headaches, Asthma,
Epilepsy, Heart Irregularities, Depression, Rage Reactions, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (1988).
Jack and his wife, Adrienne, found to their amazement that removing MSG from his diet caused his
symptoms to go away. Inspired by this life-altering knowledge, Jack testified about MSG’s potential toxicity
before the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)
in 1989 and into the 1990s, and launched with Adrienne the non-profit consumer advocacy organisation,
the Truth in Labelling Campaign (TLC) (Samuels 1999). TLC filed a class-action suit against the FDA in
1995, calling for transparent labelling of all sources of MSG in processed foods. The suit was prompted by
the 31 August 1995 release of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB)’s
FDA-commissioned report “Analysis of Adverse Reactions to Monosodium Glutamate.” Their wide-ranging
study reaffirmed the agency’s position that all forms of processed free glutamate were “safe food ingredients
for most people when eaten at customary levels” (LSRO1995; FDA 1995).
Industry lobby groups and the FDA would come to cite the FASEB report as the last word in safety assurance
of MSG. Activists like the Samuels would dismiss it as the latest instalment of industry misrepresentation
and scientific evasion. The FASEB report did acknowledge the existence of what Schwartz had dubbed an
“MSG symptom complex,” identifying two small subgroups of the population: (1) those few individuals
inexplicably intolerant to large doses of MSG; and (2) those who exhibited “poorly controlled asthma” and
might experience worsening of their condition after ingestion of MSG. However, one of critics’ most
compelling objections is that the FASEB investigation set particular parameters for MSG reactivity; it sought
1Sarah Tracy
the symptoms and signs of acute, temporary, and “self-limited” adverse reactions, but did not investigate the
potentially severe, delayed, or prolonged reactions to MSG which have long been reported to the FDA (LSRO
1995; Samuels 1999). The narrow temporal parameters of MSG’s investigation by this credible scientific
body gave insufficient justification for withdrawing MSG from the market or for requiring mandatory
labelling of all its forms. In fact, it might be said that no more was officially known of MSG in 1996—of how
it works and with what secondary effects—than in 1994. Why then was the additive such a point of
contention if all clinical indications supported its relative safety for human consumption?
A synthetic amino-acid that heightens its consumer’s taste response to savoury foods, MSG’s effects trouble
the conceptual boundaries between food and drug, science and industry, and life and matter. Its action in
human metabolism brings into focus the larger question of how human bodies are constituted in ongoing
relation with the manifold substances we inhale, touch, drink, and eat. It demands a redefinition of the
customary designations with which we describe bodies, e.g., “food,” “drug,” “inside,” “outside,” “immune
system,” “toxin,” “physiology,” “neurology,” “biochemistry,” and “metabolism,” to name a few. MSG reveals
the politics that animate biotechnologies’ direct and indirect interventions into the interactions of
organisms. MSG is thus a window into how lively matter—the material-immaterial vitality and generativity
long thought proper to the condition of being alive—becomes instrumentalized within global capital.I
Originated in Japan at the turn of the twentieth century and exported through southeast Asia, China, and
the United States (and later the rest of the world), MSG’s history reflects a particular set of complex local,
domestic, and global forces. Manufactured and marketed in Japan, by Japanese, during the Meiji-era (1868–
1912) clamour for national progress and modernization, the additive has a long, often invisible presence in
nationally specific, iconic Japanese and American (among others) brands. The additive reveals that the
instrumentalization of lively matter is compatible with both “Western” and Japanese notions of life, nature,
and the body. Scholars have offered cogent arguments as to how, historically, Japanese have conceived of the
natural as encompassing—or sometimes tending intrinsically toward—improvement, to the realization of
the purest essence of a thing. Social life is seen to occupy the same register as all lively matter; humanity, as
a part of—rather than an observer of—natural profusion, is not isolated by the hard nature-society duality
so fundamental to modern scientific and political thought in Western Europe (Morris-Suzuki 1998; Asquith
and Kalland 1997; Liu 1999).
This binary, reflecting the belief that humans (via science, technology) could control the natural, underwrote
the Fordist mode of production (and associated subjectivities) so predominant in the twentieth century.
With the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s, however, scholars have argued that a post-Fordist management
paradigm hinges on our ability to manage the natural with techniques of coping with innumerable variables,
by hedging bets and predicting risk factors (Bavington 2010; Cooper 2008; Lash and Lury 2007). MSG
reflects this transition in thought and practice as a technology whose public health risk is hedged through
the marginalization of adverse reactions, as enabled by the scientific authority of the clinical trial. What
remains to be seen is how the effectivity of this synthetic amino acid is mediated by global capital flows
through, around, and beyond its Japanese origins.
MSG’s utility is that it enables food producers to capitalize on human neurological reactivity. Speaking
broadly to Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, or the politicization of “life itself,” I am concerned here with MSG
as a layered example of how capital forms valuate and politicize bodily capacity: first, MSG is manufactured
primarily from the excretions of genetically modified bacterial strains; second, its function as a synthetic
chemical agent is to manipulate the biochemistry of human taste perception—producing an alleged drug
effect in its consumer (Blaylock 1997). As a biotech intervention into human bodies, MSG calls into
question the commonplace understanding of taste in the United States: as a subjective, sensory experience
which, seemingly counter-intuitively, is also a universal, bodily sensory function (along with sight, smell,
touch, hearing) alterable by science (Howes 2005; Jütte 2005; Hinton et al. 2008).
I. For Aristotle, generativity was an essential property of nature, one whose application to the principles of exchange (via money lending
and the earning of interest) posed an ethical dilemma as a deviation from the natural order. See Helmreich 2008 (469).
2Metabolising MSG: Tasting, Making, and Managing with Flavour Agent Monosodium Glutamate
In light of long-standing allegations of MSG complicity in a range of neurological disorders, I ask what is at
stake in this billion dollar global commodity—so valued for its ability to harness human neurochemistry—
mutating metabolic capacities into economic efficiencies? Such improvement of natural phenomena is the
goal that has animated the much longer story of modern science; however, as science intensifies the scope
and scale of its ability to reorder the capacities of lively matter, does life’s capacity for unpredictable
adaptation also intensify in scope and scale? While microbial organisms have been recognized as playing a
vital role in human food preparation and metabolism/digestion, and if we share a constitutive—and
interdependent—biochemistry, with what possible effects are the excretions of genetically engineered
bacteria metabolized by the human body? These kinds of questions continue to preoccupy scholars of the
life sciences, due in no small part to our ongoing resolve to devise “better” scientific or management
interventions to counteract the stubborn resilience of the lively matter we mean to control (Haraway 1991,
2003; Margulis and Sagan 2002; Helmreich 2009; Waldby and Mitchell 2006; Tsing and Satsuka 2008;
Bavington 2010). As trade liberalization in an opportunity-based global community has become a
commonplace, theories of an interconnected, global biological realm have gained popularity as well. As
Melinda Cooper and Joe Masco have recently argued, the global threats and opportunities of an age of
nuclear holocaust, “star wars” programs, and climate change have helped solidify notions of a risky global
“biosphere” in which the life sciences—like capital—reveal universal truths (Cooper 2008; Masco 2010).
As just one transnational “biological,” MSG illuminates the frictions and lines of fracture that characterize
the drift and transposition of biotech innovations intended to improve (de)valued lively matter by
abstracting and commodifying it. In the case of MSG, the intervention passes—often invisibly, illegibly—as
a simple food additive. Scholars have offered modes for thinking about the inseparability of life and capital
within neoliberalism, and about the stakes of commercial valuation of the conditions and capacities of lively
matter (Haraway 1997; Lock 2002; Hayden 2003; Rajan 2007; Cooper 2008; Helmreich 2008; Cohen 2009;
Landecker 2007, 2011). Many have employed the analytic of biocapital to signal “the implosion of
enterprises of scientific fact production with those of capitalist value generation” to the extent that
considering one without the other would disavow the very nature of the categories and the actors therein—
or what Joseph Dumit has called “venture science” (Rajan 2007, 4-13, 20–22; Dumit 2003). I engage MSG
as a form of biocapital, a mechanism for instrumentalizing lively matter’s metabolic capacities. I do not
assign global capitalism a totalizing power; however, I want to foreground the importance of its logics (life
as property, the right to corporate profit, the rational citizen-consumer, etc.) in shaping the parameters for
knowledge and discussion of MSG as a commercial asset and as a public health risk.
What follows is some provisional thinking on the meanings and stakes of this global biotech intervention
into lively matter, and a provocation as to which economies are presumed to govern how particular bodies
incorporate those wholes, parts, or products of other bodies in constituting and experiencing themselves.
Building on scholarship on global capitalisms and the life sciences in translation (Latour 1987, 1999; Mol
and Law 1994; Petryna 2009; Fujimura 2005; Harvey 2006; Adams 2002; Comaroff and Comaroff 2009), I
explore the specificities of a purified East Asian seaweed, lifted out of its historical ecologies by the
laboratory and by capital onto the particular cultural and ecological topographies of the United States. MSG
as a technology assumes metabolism and taste as biological functions, firmly located within the purview of
science; however, the evidence of MSG’s experience as an alleged dietary toxin suggests that its reconfiguring
of lively matter operates in much more contingent, subjective, and unpredictable ways, alongside and within
emergent, flexible practices of bodily (mis-)management.
Making MSG
A food engineering phenomenon of the twentieth century, “MSG” occurs naturally in the form of a seaweed
called sea tangle (kombu in Japanese and Laminaria japonica to science) with historic roots in pan-Asian
home cuisine. The laboratory isolate L-glutamate and its sodium salt form of monosodium glutamate were
discovered at the turn of the twentieth century by a Japanese chemist named Kikunae Ikeda while
investigating his wife’s use of kombu as flavouring in stock. Recognizing MSG’s commercial potential, Ikeda
registered his discovery in April 1909 through British patent law under the patent number 9440, titled
“Manufacture of a Flavouring Material” (Glutamate Association 2006; Schwartz 1988, 5). He joined forces
3Sarah Tracy
with former pharmacist Saburosuke Suzuki in launching what has remained the largest corporate producer
of MSG, Ajinomoto Inc., whose name literally means “the essence of flavour.” Ajinomoto proclaimed it had
discovered a fifth taste sensation, which its scientists called umami, or “savouriness.” In addition to the
recognized taste sensations of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter, umami, the company declared, was a sensation of
flavour imparted distinctly by MSG (Ajinomoto 2006; Glutamate Association 2006).
Heralded in the immediate post-war period by military and corporate proponents in the United States as a
cure-all, miracle food additive, MSG appeared to be modern science’s antidote to the drawbacks of mass food
manufacture: diminished freshness and flavour, and thus a consumer experience of diminished quality. MSG
made food taste better. As is the case with so many new pharmaceutical products, proponents of MSG began
with its effect (of increased taste sensation) and only later worked backward towards explaining its possible
causes. In a climate of technocratic optimism, MSG was poised to become a food industry staple. Early
adoption by such prominent companies as Campbell Foods, Libby, General Foods, Standard Brands, Nestlé,
United Airlines Food Service, Borden, Pillsbury, Gerber, and Oscar Mayer marked the establishment of a new
industry lifeline (Schwartz 1988, 5–7). Monosodium glutamate’s consumption in the U.S. is reported to have
doubled in every decade since the 1960s, most visibly as the table top condiment Ac’cent (Blaylock 1997,
xviii). The global demand for the additive has grown exponentially, as part of a booming “fermentation
products” market (along with enzymes, nucleotides, polysaccharides, and other amino acids) valued at
nearly $22 billion US in 2004 (Partos 2005a; 2005b). The 2009 global production levels of MSG were
estimated at 2 million tons (Sano 2009, 729).
What, precisely, is monosodium glutamate? The additive is nondescript in appearance, its white crystalline
powder form looking like nothing so much as sugar or table salt. It is readily soluble in water, inert—that
is, does not destabilize other food ingredients—neither absorbs humidity nor solidifies, and has no distinct
taste or smell of its own. It is produced by chemical processes—extraction, synthesis, and fermentation—
which denature the protein in which glutamic acid occurs to yield the isolate L-glutamic acid (International
Glutamate Information Service 2011; Huffman and Skelly 1963). Extraction begins with a raw ingredient
rich in naturally occurring, bound glutamate such as corn, wheat, soybean, cassava, or sugarcane;
L-glutamaic acid is extracted by autolysis, enzymolysis, or hydrolysis and processed into the sodium salt
form of monosodium glutamate, which grants ease of storage and use. The most common method of MSG
production, however, is microbial fermentation, in which bacterial strains are engineered to produce in
isolation the desired amino acid—glutamic acid—within a nutrient medium. These production distinctions
are significant because “MSG” has evolved as a byword for any “processed free glutamate” (L-glutamic acid)
present in foods. The final composition of monosodium glutamate is roughly 78 percent L-glutamic acid, 12
percent sodium, and 9 percent water, with up to a 1 percent balance of contaminants like D-glutamic acid
and pyroglutamic acid resulting from manufacture (Leung and Foster 1996, 373–375; FDA 2005; Schwartz
1988, 34, 149–150). Since the 1960s, fermentation via bacterial cultures like Micrococcus glutamicus and
Corynebacterium glutamicum has been the production method preferred by manufacturers. Harvesting the
metabolic excretions of genetically modified bacteria facilitates production economies impossible to achieve
when relying on hydrolysis or autolysis of conventional protein sources, e.g., corn or sugarcane (Blaylock
1997, 24; Ajinomoto 2006; Udaka 1960, 754; Kalinowski et al. 2003). Ajinomoto cites the profitability of
the fermentation method as having provided the “great impetus for expanding the amino acid market”
(Ajinomoto 2006). Thus, the mass production–and consumption—of flavour-enhancing MSG was realized
through instrumentalizing the metabolic pathways of a bacterium.
However, virtuoso bacteria are only half of MSG’s metabolic equation. For over half a century, researchers
have been embroiled in the question of how “processed free glutamate,” or that manufactured for addition
to processed founds (and known as MSG), affects the human body. Beginning in the 1950s, reports of MSG’s
possible toxicity began to surface from scientists and later concerned citizens, materializing MSG, the
suspect additive, as an object of popular scrutiny. In 1968, Robert Ho Man Kwok, MD, a recent Chinese
emigrant to the United States, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine the first published account
of human symptoms arising from MSG ingestion: numbness, tingling, and tightness of the chest after eating
at American-Chinese restaurants (Kwok 1968; Mosby 2009). While the NEJM received a flurry of letters
4Metabolising MSG: Tasting, Making, and Managing with Flavour Agent Monosodium Glutamate
from readers who reported having similar reactions, what the journal dubbed the “Chinese-Restaurant
Syndrome” was met by scepticism and derision from the scientific community. Dr. Herbert Schaumberg at
the Albert Einstein School of Medicine commenced a study of MSG’s effects in order, he noted with sarcasm,
to stem the “mounting hysteria and prevent the wholesale slaughter of Chinese restaurant owners” (Samuels
1999: 260). Despite his initial doubts, Schaumberg’s 1969 report found overwhelmingly that MSG, when
consumed at levels customary in many prepared foods, did produce such symptoms as headache, burning,
and tightness around the face, neck, and chest in virtually all fifty-six test subjects (Schaumberg et al. 1969).
In the same year, neurophysiologist Dr. J.W. Olney, working out of the Department of Psychiatry at
Washington University in St. Louis, found that MSG caused extensive damage in mice not only to neurons
in the retina, but also to those in the hypothalamus and other areas of the brain. This pivotal study birthed
the eventual understanding of glutamate as an excitatory neurotransmitter, which when present in excess
amounts in the brain stimulates nerve cells until they die (Olney 1969, 1974; Olney and Ho 1970; Schwartz
1988: 11–13).
By the late 1980s, neurologists had established that the presence of MSG on the tongue—as with any other
substance—causes the taste buds to instigate a nervous reaction which radiates through the chorda typana
nerve directly to the cortex of the brain, from which this reaction spreads. MSG was identified as an
excitotoxin, or a form of neurotoxin associated with systematic neuronal death (Beksan et al. 2003; Fuke and
Ueda 1996; Schiffman 1996). Some critics alleged MSG caused a drug reaction in the body; its range of
effects on different consumers was consistent not with an isolated allergic reaction but with a true drug
reaction, which by definition affects everyone, but to varying degrees at varying times (similar to the case of
caffeine). In 1988, Dr. George Schwartz wrote In Bad Taste, The MSG Syndrome, the book that changed the
Samuels’ lives and the first full-length work on the subject intended for a general audience. Schwartz’s book
popularized the idea of an “MSG symptom complex,” or a “cascade” of common ailments (anxiety,
depression, obesity, etc.) attributed to ever-rising levels of MSG ingestion. Central to his critique were
reports that MSG “symptoms” could be experienced as little as twenty minutes and as long as two days after
ingesting the additive (Schwartz 1988).
In their non-purified forms, fundamental amino acids like glutamic acid are found in plants and animals as
neurotransmitters. Since these fundamental amino acids are necessary and naturally occurring chemicals,
the blood-brain barrier (the brains’ protective mechanism is not believed to regulate their passage in and out
of the brain. Thus, the concern of some researchers is that an increasing dietary consumption of processed
free glutamate can result in an accumulation of glutamate in the neuron. Some speculate that the glial cells—
which provide energy to the neuron—cannot always supply sufficient energy to counterbalance an
accelerated supply of the excitatory amino acid; as a result, surplus glutamate disrupts the neuron’s
regulation of sodium and calcium, enabling the free glutamates, as ions or “free radicals,” to wreak havoc by
causing destabilizing chemical reactions with surrounding cells. In this way, rising dietary consumption of
processed free glutamate has been alleged to cause neurons to “fire and die” (Olney 1988; Choi 1990; Coyle
et al. 1981; Blaylock 1997, 39–47).II
Most intriguing are recent industry investigations into treatments for neurological conditions and
replacement additives for sugar, salt, and MSG. Japan’s Daiichi Pharmaceutical Company has made inquiries
into treatment for Alzheimer’s disease based on chemical interventions designed to “[protect] neurons from
over-stimulation by glutamate.” San Diego-based biotechnology company Senomyx has reportedly
collaborated with Kraft Foods, Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and Campbell Soup in developing chemical additives
which, like MSG, do not alter the food product they accompany, but will, based on insights gleaned from
the human genome sequence, be able to activate or block receptors in the mouth responsible for taste. In so
doing, these additives-in-development will enable companies to deliver products more desirable to “health
conscious consumers” by decreasing sugar, salt, and MSG content: they will enhance or replicate the
II. Processed free glutamate shares these allegations with the manufactured form of its chemical cousin, the artificial sweetener aspartame
(comprised of two amino acids, aspartate and phenylalanine, also neurotransmitters). Blaylock defines free radicals crudely as “any
atom, molecule, or group of atoms with an unpaired electron in its outer orbit” (Blaylock 1997).
5Sarah Tracy
perception of the much-loved but much-demonized sugar, salt, and MSG (Daiichi Pharmaceutical Co.
2002).III Most recently, a California-based company called Sensa has launched a patent-pending product
pitched as a breakthrough in weight loss: virtually odourless and tasteless food sprinkles that activate the
body’s “satiety center” and dubbed ‘Tastants by Dr. Alan Hirsch, founder and neurological director of the
Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago (Sensa 2011). The entry of SENSA®
sprinkles into the market suggests that the experience of human taste sensation is increasingly considered a
known entity, amenable to explicit management by enterprising scientist-entrepreneurs.
These developments illustrate seemingly contradictory constructions of human metabolic processes. The
FDA and industry-aligned researchers have for decades interpreted the “MSG symptom complex” as a
biosocial anomaly. The un-fit between the authoritative epistemology of randomized controlled trials (RCTs)
in investigations of disease causation (epidemiology) and toxic chemical exposure (toxicology) versus the
variability of MSG reactivity prevents a defensible association between symptoms of toxicity and MSG
ingestion.IV In a biopolitical analysis, the individual body here has been subsumed by the collective via a
statistically based scientific method, providing what Foucault might call a population “security mechanism,”
or the fostering of life in some and the allowance of death—or suffering—for others, i.e., “faire-vivre et
laissez-mourir” (making live and letting die) (Foucault 2003, 243–249; Foucault 2010). But it matters how
the FDA has engaged clinical study to assess the risk of MSG-exposure as an acceptable one, or minimal on
a population level, restricted to “problem” subpopulations and “special” cases of “inexplicable” sensitivity.
Distributing MSG’s risk in this way is consistent with the neoliberal mode of discharging corporate or
governmental liability for emergent health or ecological dangers, which remain poorly understood thanks to
the reductive nature of the economic and laboratory modelling that has become entrenched alongside the
vested interest of major industry and public stakeholders (Bavington 2010).
What resists mapping by RCT is how the particular metabolism of a particular organism engages with novel
chemical compounds in the context of its innumerable, ever-changing ecological relations. What “additives”
will prove toxic? Can any ingested substance truly be considered benign when each one materially
intervenes in the organism’s biochemistry? Our understanding of how processed food sources are
metabolized by our bodies, as this bears on experiences of health or ill-health, is limited by clinical trials’
logic of establishing direct causal linkages, which must be observably consistent, reproducible, and linear
(Friedrich 1998; Shostak 2005; Adams 2002; Clasquin et al. 2011). This scientific method established in
physics—often thought the purest science—neglects the long-standing observation that the relative health
and development of living beings is determined at the “nexus of a very large number of weakly determining
causal pathways”; in evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin’s words, this “deep structural limitation of the
experimental investigation in biology” ignores the observation that organisms are “internally functionally
heterogeneous” (Lewontin 2000, x). We all work differently, at different times, in different places, in
different ways. This un-fit between legitimated biological knowledge and the variable lived experiences of
taste sensation and toxic exposure, when combined with the economies of MSG’s manufacture by cheap and
available microbes and the additive’s vast commercial value, equates to a management cost-benefit
calculation greatly in MSG’s favour. It can come as no surprise that the additive’s popularity with food
manufacturers has continually grown, despite more than forty years of controversy.
Abstracting Metabolisms
The Bacterium
The question of MSG’s effects in the human body is not only an epistemological one. The additive is
manufactured by co-opting the bacterium’s particular genetic mutability. While animals—including human
animals—have only a single set of metabolic pathway, some bacteria have more than twenty fundamentally
III. According to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Kraft Foods, Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and Campbell Soup collectively
paid Senomyx $30 million to finance research and development in return for 1 percent to 4 percent of royalties once a product reaches
the shelves (Warner 2005).
IV. See, for example, these excellent discussions of the limitations and politics of clinical trials research: Porter 1995, Adams 2002,
Murphy 2006, and Greene 2007.
6Metabolising MSG: Tasting, Making, and Managing with Flavour Agent Monosodium Glutamate
different ones (Margulis and Sagan 2002, xiii, 40). The emergence of biotechnology by the 1970s was fuelled
by the discovery and industrial applications of recombinant DNA technology and the influx of private
capital into biological study. As with the selective breeding of domesticated animals, hybridising of corn
varieties, etc., these biotechnologies or “technologies of living substances,” as Hannah Landecker has termed
them, harness lively matter’s autopoiesis (self-making), or ability of living cells to perpetuate themselves and
their boundaries through the metabolism of material and energy (Landecker 2007, 2; Margulis and Sagan
2002, 40). In her work on cell cultures, Landecker demonstrates that cultured life (in vitro versus in vivo) is
premised on the manipulation not only of the life form but also of the medium in which that life exists, or
the conditions of life, and the timing of biological processes—and, by extension, the speed and scale at which
life processes are carried out.V In the engineering of MSG, the bacterial strains M. glutamicus and C.
glutamicum were found to excrete the highest amount of L-glutamic acid in the least nutrient- and energy-
rich medium. The remarkable mutability of these bacteria’s metabolism is thus valuated by contemporary
life sciences for its potential for alteration and the amenability of its metabolic capacities to the production
of “biologically important substances” (enzymes, antibodies, DNA, RNA, viruses, etc.). The bacterial bodies
of MSG manufacture are recast, rationalized “as routine tools, alienable commodities, and sites of
production” (Landecker 2007, 2–3).
Rather than pursue MSG’s history of one of rupture or novelty, I want to ask what enables this prerogative
to engineer lively matter. The technology of MSG is based on our engagement with the microbial and the
metabolic (neurochemical)—two registers that are utterly material yet beyond the apprehension of our
senses. Stefan Helmreich recent work has been concerned with the possibilities of types of embodied
vitality—types that oscillate in our imaginary from the intimate and invaluable to the foreign and
threatening. At the foundation of life as we understand it and in the omnipresent spectre of infirmity and
disease lie inert—that is, does not destabilize other food ingredients—neither absorbs humidity nor
solidifies “inert—that is, does not destabilize other food ingredients—neither absorbs humidity nor
solidifies alien” microbes and this paper’s processes of metabolism. As “neither fully self nor other”
(Helmreich 2009, x–xi, 6, 17, 246), microbes and the sensation of taste both figure as an alien front of
metabolic possibility. Taste is arguably a subjective experience fundamental to our existence and yet
manageable only when it is rendered abstract, alienated from its bodily milieu.
Taste
The sense of “taste” (noun) is defined by Medline, under the umbrella of the US National Institutes of Health
(NIH), as “1 : the one of the special senses that is concerned with distinguishing the sweet, sour, bitter, or
salty quality of a dissolved substance and is mediated by taste buds on the tongue; 2 : the objective sweet,
sour, bitter, or salty quality of a dissolved substance as perceived by the sense of taste; 3 : a sensation obtained
from a substance in the mouth that is typically produced by the stimulation of the sense of taste combined
with those of touch and smell [my emphasis].” Distinctly, “flavour” (noun) is defined as “1 a: the quality of
something that affects the sense of taste ; b: the blend of taste and smell
sensations evoked by a substance in the mouth ; 2: a substance that flavors.” The NIH
also describes taste as belonging to the chemical sensing system or chemosenses, in which tiny molecules—
i.e., from (soon-to-be) ingested substances—stimulate sensory cells in the eyes, nose, mouth, and throat.
These cells transmit nervous signals to the brain, which then interprets the taste perception experienced by
the subject (Medline 2009; Hinton et al. 2008).
These working medical definitions reveal curious inconsistencies. Elsewhere, the NIH’s descriptions of “taste
disorders” identify “at least five” different taste sensations: “sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami, (the taste
elicited by glutamate, which is found in chicken broth, meat extracts, and some cheeses). In the mouth,
these tastes, along with texture, temperature, and the sensations from the common chemical sense, combine
with odors to produce a perception of flavor [my emphasis].” The same commentary goes on to identify most
V. Much excellent work has been done by science studies scholars on how certain species’ bodily capacities have fuelled their dispro-
portionate use as model organisms” in laboratory research. See, for example, Kohler 1994, Creager 2002, and Rader 2004. [none of
these in reference list]
7Sarah Tracy
chemosensory disorders as the result of injury or illness, namely upper respiratory infection, head injury, or
exposure to chemicals such as insecticides, and by some medications. Such abnormalities in chemosensory
function may further accompany or signal the presence of various conditions including obesity, diabetes,
hypertension, malnutrition, and degenerative diseases of the nervous system like Parkinson’s disease,
Alzheimer’s disease, and Korsakoff’s psychosis. Accordingly, one branch of the NIH’s recent research is
focused on furthering our understanding of “the key receptors in our taste cells and how they work,” as well
as “how taste affects various processing activities in the brain. Specifically, the interest is in how taste
interacts with memory, influences hormonal feedback systems, and its role in eating decisions and behavior”
(NIH 2009).
Taste is thus understood in complex and contradictory terms. Is it one of a finite group of five universal
sensory registers? Is it a complex neurological response shared by all humans interacting with various
stimuli? This second understanding would suggest that the experience of taste is a circumstantial mediation
of matter—one that is inherently subjective—ecological, even—variable, contingent, and subject to
influence by chance encounter, directed intervention, or traumatic accident, and irreducible to a
physiological tasting apparatus in the tongue and throat. “Taste” is not only a multi-faceted mediation of
aroma, flavour, texture, and temperature, but also a complex neurological process that can be interrupted,
altered, or lost entirely—experienced differently in different places and times by different people (Smith
2007a, 2007b; Jütte 2005; Howes 2005; Hinton et al.2008; Nichter 2008). Ajinomoto scientists’ declaration
of umami as a universal taste sensation—and its uneven uptake in American medical literature—signals a
further, politically fraught ambiguity in the MSG story: does MSG confer a taste sensation distinct to itself,
as Ajinomoto asserts, or does the declaration highlight how claims to the objective and natural can occlude
questions of politics, exploitation, and violence (MSG as a GMO technology yielding a mass-produced
neurotoxin)? Who is served by claiming umami for an abstract, universal taste sensation? Or by obscuring
the distinction between naturally occurring, bound L-glutamic acid (found in seaweed, cheese, tomatoes,
mushrooms) and processed free glutamate (MSG, as added to stocks, soups, hotdogs, potato chips, frozen
dinners, etc.)
The Manageable Abstract
It matters how chemical substances and lively capacities are abstracted or made proper to the province of
technological management. The Lockean tradition holds that mixing one’s labour with nature confers
ownership; whoever “improves the land,” whoever applies their creative, intellectual labour to take
something out of its “natural state” makes a legitimate property claim (Helmreich 2009, 245).VI The
patenting of novel biochemical technologies like MSG lifts biological capacities off of the plane of obscurity
and non-value and grafts them onto the traffic patterns of global scientific production and commercial
exchange. Intellectual property law enables and presumes the abstracting and commodification of “life
itself” or lively matter as capacity (gene sequences, enzymes, amino acids, etc.). Patent law values lively
matter not for what it is but for what it has or could potentially be made to do (Foucault 1978; Haraway
1991; Hayden 2003). Lively matter inscrutable to our senses—abstract or “alien” life—presents a particular
register for valuation in a global capitalist world. Unable to register with our senses the microbe, the
genome, the amino acid, or the synapse, these abstract yet material constituents of our future liveliness are
easily rendered inanimate, dead: functional, quantifiable, and capitalized.VII How else are we to manage them
in their invaluable role in our future possibility? Helmreich writes that the alienability of the microbial
register emerges in response to a crisis in taxonomy, an uncertainty, an un-fit between the target and our
modes of governance (2009, 16). I would suggest that MSG’s conflation in industry discourse with its non-
synthetic chemical “equivalent,” L-glutamic acid, reflects biomedicine’s entrenched claim that knowledge of
lively matter is commensurate with knowledge of its constituent parts and operatives. This occlusion of the
VI. An extremophile is an organism adapted to living in extreme conditions with regard to temperature, pressure, or chemical concen-
tration, e.g., highly acidic or salty environments.
VII. Theories of rendering dead and “killability” have been fruitfully developed by several scholars working in Marxist, deconstructionist,
or otherwise critical traditions. See, for example, Derrida 1994, Agamben 2005, and Waldby and Mitchell 2006.
8Metabolising MSG: Tasting, Making, and Managing with Flavour Agent Monosodium Glutamate
ecological critique, of the importance of life as relation—or its co-optation in cybernetics and systems
theory—underpins leading medical thought from psychiatry to pharmaceutical design to genomic research
(Wiener 1965; White 1996; Thurtle 2007; Lewontin 2000; Oyama 2000).
The variability and unpredictability of reactivity to MSG in terms of its rapidity, severity, and consistency of
effects would seem to assign it to the management paradigm Dean Bavington categorizes as “coping”—as
opposed to a Fordist model of management “control” of natural variables (Bavington 2010). Yet the
authoritative epistemology of the clinical trial is premised on the feasibility and desirability of experimental
control. The fact that MSG and its symptoms are never discussed explicitly as excitotoxic in regulatory or
industry discourse—but euphemized as a “flavouring agent” and allergy—adds to the ambiguity with which
MSG is represented in the American imaginary (International Glutamate Information Service 2011;
Glutamate Association 2006). MSG’s effects when metabolized are obscured by the food industry’s purposive
disassociation of the additive with consumer red flags like “toxin” and “drug” and its by its discussion in
abstract, commerce-compliant terms like value-add to consumers, product differentiation through improved
“mouthfeel” and flavour, the universal fifth taste sensation umami, and a “naturally occurring” flavour
enhancer found in all kinds of friendly and familiar foods.
Context Matters: A New Biopolitics?
Scholars concerned with bodily governance from the micro- to the macro-registers have played with
reinvigorating Foucault’s analytic of biopolitics. In Heather Paxson’s work, the raw-milk cheese movement
in the United States reflects a wider disagreement of ethics and governance on how humans ought to live
not only with microbes, but with one another. For Paxson, the microbial is simply another register of life
which demands prediction and rational ordering, an arena of microbiopolitics, as it were, in which categories
of microscopic biological agents must be created, anthropocentrically evaluated, and the appropriate
human-microorganism interactions (infection, inoculation, digestion) prescribed (Paxson 2008, 16–17;
Latour 1988). Stephan Helmreich conceives of the management of human-microbial relations as a
symbiopolitics, or the “governance of relations among entangled living things” (2009, 237). In either
formulation, a biopolitics incorporating the microbial recognizes the reverberations of “the vital organismic
agencies of bacteria, viruses, and fungi” against existing systems of governance and commodification
(Paxson 2008, 17). The enrolling of variously scaled biotic capacities in projects of public health and
commercial enterprise reflect an imperative to know, to predict, and to control all those interactions that
vitally influence human quality of life and organisation. The C. glutamicum of MSG production is re-
engineered to maximize its utility in commercial MSG production. However, the laboratory organism
nonetheless remains alive—unnatural, yet still plastic, resonating against/within/alongside the other bodies
it encounters (Landecker 2007; Franklin 2007).
A central assumption of modern biology (classificatory, evolutionary, systems) has been the discrete and
sovereign nature of the organism. Donna Haraway has rejected the sovereign organism and the nature-
culture boundary by conceptualizing living creatures as networked agents, non-human and human, in
which companion species or “mess mates” are integral to human sociality (Haraway 2003). The evolutionist
Ernst Mayr has claimed that “every individual of most species is actually a consortium of several species”
(Margulis and Sagan 2002, xiv). Evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis and science scholar Dorion Sagan
have asserted that symbionts or associate species—two or more organisms of different kinds that exist in
protracted physical contact, e.g., the intestinal bacterial in the human gut that make the vitamins K and B
that we absorb through our intestinal walls—comprise an estimated 10 percent dry weight of the average
human body. For Margulis and Sagan, the human body is more accurately understood as a “walking
assemblage” or “loose committee” of associated organisms (Margulis and Sagan 2002, 18–19). Why the
persistence of reductionist modelling of lively matter (Canguilhem 1975, 1988; Greco 2005)? As uniquely
composite, variable, and ecological “assemblages,” the human consumer of MSG—not to mention the
bacterium who made the additive possible—is nearly impossible to map from within the clinical trial. MSG’s
effects are as variable as those of other foods, drugs—and “drug-foods” (coffee, vitamins, dairy, wheat, soy,
etc.)—dependent on one’s metabolic rate, genetics, sex, age, geographical location/ecology, relative
nutrition, stress, fatigue, hunger, ad infinitum. Simply put, life, health, illness, satiation, and starvation would
9Sarah Tracy
seem to all be relational, contextual, experiential phenomena with which, despite the vaunted authority of
the randomized controlled trial (RCT), food safety regulators and industry stakeholders can only try
stubbornly to cope.
Conclusion
I have considered how a more fluid, emergent, and interconnected notion of life—such as that attributed to
historical Japanese culture—shed light on a complex, interconnected technoscientific phenomenon.
Animating biotech interventions into those biological capacities we cannot see, smell, hear, or immediately
grasp is the abstract mechanism with which we make those unknowable forces—our taste sensation,
metabolism, bacteria—knowable and valuable. The bacterial bodies enlisted in the manufacture of a food
additive represent one pillar of this exploration of MSG as a biotech phenomenon; the second is the
commodification of human taste response. Both technologies and commercial assets are realized through the
abstracting of metabolism processes into biochemical inputs and outputs, e.g., streamlined metabolic
pathways yielding a desired output: glutamate. As a natural and necessary neurotransmitter, the idea is that
glutamate may be ingested in purified form with impunity. Underpinning both the bacterial and human
dimensions of the MSG phenomenon is the assumption that biochemical context is irrelevant to wellness or
the lack thereof, that bacterial and human bodies are knowable by their composite parts and processes
which, once mapped, can be optimized.
I have ventured as to whether MSG requires of us a new “biopolitics”—whether it signals a transitional crisis
of management of highly valued embodied phenomena. Does attention to management theory provide as a
more precise way of thinking about how “venture science” engages MSG as biocapital? As a biotechnological
object, MSG illustrates the ways and stakes with which the biotech-food industry harnesses both microbial
and human metabolic capacities for the proliferation of capital—through consumer value, production
economy, and brand advantage. In this calculus, human neurological function, bacterial metabolism, and
human ingenuity are all valued monetarily. MSG’s variable effects in the human body are naturalized by
virtue of the known biochemical inputs that render its ineffable function a rational one. In fact, experts do
not know exactly how MSG does what it does. And that lack of knowledge—and its consequences—is
discharged by conflating the naturally-occurring amino acid L-glutamate with processed free glutamate,
commonly referred to as MSG. Those individuals whose experience of MSG ingestion results in relatively
severe symptoms are marginalized as inexplicably “allergic,” just as a minority of modern citizens
everywhere are seen as randomly, irrationally allergic to some substances that to others are benign (we have
Benadryl® for them). Any unconscious MSG reactivity manifesting as headache, fatigue, anxiety, etc. may
easily be interpreted as the result of any of the innumerable other variables (stress, fatigue, etc.) that prompt
in us a range of disagreeable psychosomatic responses.
Combined with the difficulty of producing consistent symptoms in laboratory tests, our “open,”
multifactorial bodies prevent the additive from being correlated to the increased incidence in the United
States of complex, chronic conditions like anxiety, depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and
Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s diseases. As such, onus for food safety is passed from industry and government
to the citizen-consumer. MSG’s role in the abstract, mechanistic phenomenon of taste biochemistry,
unevenly marshalled as the new taste sensation umami, papers over the contingent, variable nature of MSG
reactivity. The cost—loss? risk?—of ambiguously ailing human bodies is implicitly gauged alongside the
benefits of a greater number of profitably stimulated bodies. And in a hyper-hygienic, commercially inclined
late capitalist calculus, the negligible value of rogue bacterial bodies renders them accessible to
“improvement” in the name of better eating through chemistry. All this would suggest that (re)modelling
the relational context of lively matter—like bacterial metabolic pathways and human neural synapses—in
the pursuit of profitable control may prompt gradual, but unmanageable repercussions with which we will
may or may not be able to cope. For it is the specificities, the subjective dimensions of the material “food”-
“body” encounter resulting in enhanced taste response, which lie at the heart of the MSG question.
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