If MSG is so bad for you, why doesn’t everyone in Asia have a headache?

Good question. Not since the false demonization of the tomato as a poisonous cousin of the deadly nightshade has another ingredient usurped such mythical and misbegotten ill repute.

What does chiefly animate Japanese soups and broths is an amino acid called glutamate. In the best ramen shops it’s made naturally from boiling dried kombu seaweed; it can also come from dried shrimp or bonito flakes, or from fermented soy. More cheaply and easily, you get it from a tin, where it is stabilised with ordinary salt and is thus monosodium glutamate.

This last fact is of little interest to the Japanese - like most Asians, they have no fear of MSG. And there lies one of the world’s great food scare conundrums. If MSG is bad for you - as Jeffrey Steingarten, the great American Vogue food writer once put it - why doesn’t everyone in China have a headache?

I liken this to the Reefer Madness scare of the 20th century. MSG has been demonized from the bully pulpit, scandalized by a generation of shucksters perpetuating false truths and slanderous lies. Armchair chemists and erstwhile nutritionists, burnishing speciously gained junk science, falsely projected their own hypochondriac ill-conceptions upon a gullible population so quick to scapegoat any perceived threat to their imagined, self-absorbed pollyanna-ish reality. Stop the madness, I say. Back off that ledge, come back from the brink of insanity, embrace the M to S to the G. MSG!

It is your obligation, no, your mission, dear reader, to walk into any Asian restaurant who proudly proclaims “No MSG!” and tell them to cease with the lies. Demand that they exhibit the moral conviction to make a stand, to end the illusion. There’s no impropriety; alas, no reason for shame. We need not adorn this scarlet letter. Wear it proud, and wear it loud.

Everything has MSG. MSG is everywhere. MSG is taste. MSG is living. MSG is life. Long live MSG.