Alastair Little, Richard Whittington

Monosodium Glutamate

Appears in
The Daily Mail Modern British Cookbook
The Daily Mail Modern British Cookbook

By Alastair Little and Richard Whittington

Published 1998

  • About
Sometimes sold as ‘taste powder’, monosodium glutamate (MSG) is essentially glutamic acid, an amino acid found naturally in a number of foods, including kelp, seaweed, soy sauce and wheat, and which is commercially extracted from fermented molasses to make this much used and abused flavour-enhancer on a huge scale.

Yan-Kit So, an authority on Chinese food, says 400,000 tonnes of MSG (weijing) are produced worldwide each year. Since it is added to food in powder form in tiny amounts to give a rich, meaty flavour this gives some indication of how widespread its use has become. Though originally a Japanese invention, it is today omnipresent in Chinese restaurant kitchens, where a pinch of MSG is added to a dish as automatically as a pinch of salt.