To Be Delicious: A Cultural Context of MSG in the UK

Artwork by Natasha Phang Lee

We live in an era where food ingredients and additives have never been more discussed - and more contested. There’s room for a healthy, informed discussion about transparency and good practice within our food systems, sure, but so much of this conversation is often laced with sensationalism and misinformation. And this is never more true than when it comes to one thing: MSG.

Since I’ve been making Lecker, a thread I keep following is the way in which structures and systems of the wider world make their way into domestic space and influence what happens in our home kitchens. And when it comes to store cupboard ingredients no other single ingredient has been subject to as much controversy or negative coverage as MSG - monosodium glutamate.

Angela Hui’s mum, Jin Tian, shows us the jar of MSG in her home kitchen.

For this series, I’m handing over to Dr Anna Sulan Masing, a writer and academic who is particularly interested in looking at ingredients as a way to understand the world we live in. 

Over five episodes Anna explores the food heritage of East and South East Asian communities in the UK, through the lens of umami and the ingredient MSG. It is the culmination of a year of research that led Anna to interview a huge range of people, read some really interesting pieces of research and look at how other cultures and countries have influenced the food in Britain. 

So often the conversation around MSG is very polarised and framed as a ‘debate’ - a yes or no on whether MSG is ‘healthy’ or ‘dangerous’, when really it’s been proven to be a completely safe ingredient for years now. For so long, particularly people of East and South East Asian heritage and backgrounds have been subject to racism as a result of misinformation around this simple ingredient. 

In this mini series, we wanted to open out the conversation around MSG and find a breadth of new ways for us to think about its usage within cooking, and its importance within cultural heritage. Welcome to To Be Delicious: A cultural context of MSG in the UK.

Credits:

Hosted by @annasulan
Produced by @dearlovelucy & @annasulan
Original theme music by @midorijaeger
Podcast artwork by @npl_illustration

The series is completely editorially independent and was made possible, along with Anna's wider research, by support from the European Committee for Umami and Ajinomoto.