668: The Long Fuse
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A few years ago, Jennifer Gomeshre was watching this PBS cooking show, and this chef, David Chang, started talking about MSG, and of course lots of people believe MSG is bad for you. Because your headaches, food hangover, that idea has been around for decades. I grew up hearing this, maybe you did too. But Jennifer knows this is a myth. And in fact, the very next segment on the show is science and food writer Harold McGee saying just that. And he just had this sort of throwaway line that yeah, this myth of MSG being harmful can be traced back to one letter in the New England Journal of Medicine. A letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine. And I was just sitting there going, huh, one letter. It was like, oh, it's an origin story. At the time, Jennifer was a PhD student, very interested in the way people talk about race and Asian Americans. So to hear that there was once this letter, the letter Americans to freak out about the dangers of an ingredient commonly used in Chinese food, an ingredient that was later proven totally harmless, Jennifer wanted to see that letter. So she went into the stacks, found this old journal from the sixties, and there it was. A letter to the editor from a doctor titled Chinese Restaurant Syndrome. So the letter reads, for several years since I have been in this country, I have experienced a strange syndrome whenever I have eaten out in a Chinese restaurant. The syndrome, which usually begins 15 to 20 minutes after I have eaten the first dish, lasts for about two hours, without any hangover effect. The most prominent symptoms are numbness at the back of the neck. He runs through the symptoms that he's observed, then he runs through the possible causes for this strange numbness, and eliminates them one by one. Soy sauce, no. Cooking wine, no. And then he gets to the sentence that's going to live on for a half century. Quote, "Others have suggested that it may be caused by the monosodium glutamate seasoning used to a great extent for seasoning in Chinese restaurants." And that one line is what spawned his entire myth. The letter was signed. Robert Ho Manquak MD. So the first thing she did was look up Dr. Kwak to get the whole story from him. What she learned was, Dr. Kwak had been a researcher and a pediatrician in Maryland, and he was dead, she ran out of obituary from 2014. So instead, she traced the history of how this letter blew up, led to all these other things, by reading subsequent issues of the New England Journal of Medicine and newspapers from the time and other documents. She wrote a paper, published it in an academic journal in 2017. And then after that, she gets his voicemail on her work number, this is the last year. She's a professor at Colgate University. Yes, good afternoon. My name is Dr. Howard Steele. I'm a Colgate alumn, in fact, I'm the oldest surviving trustee that's Colgate. And I'm in there for just God. And love it. At first, I'm just like, "Am I in trouble?"
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