The White Powder That Haunted America

 

Being a True Account of How Fear Fed on Prejudice and Grew Fat

Listen, friend. Settle in, because I’ve got a story to tell you about America in the year of our Lord 2025, when you’d think—wouldn’t you?—that we’d have gotten past our old demons. But demons, they’ve got a way of hanging around, don’t they? Like the smell of cigarette smoke in a dead man’s coat.

This particular demon wore the face of a white crystalline powder that goes by the name of monosodium glutamate. MSG to its friends. Vetsin to some. The Devil’s Seasoning to others who should have known better.

Now, before you go thinking this is some tale of supernatural horror—well, maybe it is, in its own way. Because the real horror isn’t in the powder itself. No sir. The real horror is in what we did to ourselves with it, and why.

The Letter That Started It All

Picture, if you will, the year 1968. The country was coming apart at the seams—Vietnam, riots in the streets, kids burning flags and draft cards. In the middle of all this chaos, a Chinese-American doctor named Robert Ho Man Kwok—and doesn’t that name just roll off the tongue like something from a different world?—sits down to write a letter.

Dr. Kwok had himself a meal at a Chinese restaurant. Good food, probably. The kind that makes your mouth water just thinking about it. But afterward, his head started pounding like a bass drum at a high school football game, and his limbs went numb as a dead fish.

Now, any sensible person might have thought: “Hell, could have been anything. The salt. The wine. Maybe I’m coming down with the flu.” But Dr. Kwok, he had himself a theory. Three theories, actually. Salt, cooking wine, or that mysterious white powder they called MSG.

So he writes this letter to the New England Journal of Medicine. Professional publication, you understand. The kind of place where serious medical minds gather to discuss serious medical business.

And those serious medical minds? They published that letter without so much as a “Hold on there, Doc, maybe we ought to look into this a bit more.”

The Media Feeding Frenzy

What happened next was like watching a match get thrown into a gasoline-soaked woodpile. Whoosh. Up it went.

Every newspaper, every magazine, every two-bit reporter with a typewriter and a deadline suddenly had themselves a brand-new syndrome to write about. “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome,” they called it, and didn’t that just slide off the tongue like a snake through tall grass?

They painted MSG as some kind of mysterious Oriental poison, seeping into the American bloodstream one fortune cookie at a time. Chinese restaurants became the boogeyman’s lair, places where unsuspecting Americans went to poison themselves with exotic chemicals.

But here’s the thing that really gets my goat about this whole sorry affair: MSG isn’t some mad scientist’s creation cooked up in a laboratory. It’s the sodium salt of glutamic acid—an amino acid that occurs naturally in tomatoes, mushrooms, parmesan cheese, and yes, even mother’s milk. That’s right, friends. Every baby that ever suckled at its mother’s breast has been getting a dose of the stuff that supposedly turns your brain to mush.

The Ghost in the Machine

Now, you might be wondering: Why did this particular poison panic take hold the way it did? Why MSG? Why Chinese restaurants?

The answer, like so many American answers, leads us down a dark road paved with old hatreds and older fears.

See, Americans had been afraid of the Chinese since way back in the 1800s, when they came over as cheap labor to build our railroads and work our mines. “Taking American jobs,” people said. “Yellow peril,” they whispered in parlors and saloons.

That fear crystallized into law with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—a piece of legislation so ugly and raw that it banned Chinese immigration outright. For sixty-one years, that law sat on the books like a cancer, telling the world exactly what America thought of its Chinese neighbors.

When Dr. Kwok’s letter hit the medical journals, it was like somebody had taken that old demon, dusted it off, and dressed it up in a white lab coat. Suddenly, it wasn’t just about taking jobs anymore. Now they were poisoning our food.

The Junk Science Horror Show

What followed was a parade of studies that would have made P. T. Barnum proud. Researchers—and I use that term loosely—started pumping laboratory animals full of MSG in doses that would choke a horse. Five times the normal amount. Ten times. Thirty times.

Amanda Li, a nutritionist from the University of Washington—and thank God for people like her who still believe in the truth—explained it best: “They were injecting MSG directly into animals’ stomachs. Shooting it into their bloodstreams. Methods that had about as much relation to normal eating as a root canal has to brushing your teeth.”

But the damage was done. These half-assed studies got published, got quoted, got repeated until the lie became truth through sheer repetition. It’s an old trick, and it works every time.

The Bitter Irony

Here’s the part that’ll really fry your bacon: MSG was actually discovered by a Japanese chemist named Kikunae Ikeda way back in 1908. He isolated it from seaweed and realized he’d found the secret to that rich, savory taste that makes your mouth water. Called it “umami”—the fifth taste, alongside sweet, sour, salty, and bitter.

Ikeda started a company to produce the stuff. Called it Ajinomoto, which means “essence of taste” in Japanese. For decades, it made food taste better across the globe. Then one letter to a medical journal turned it into public enemy number one.

The real kicker? Every major health organization that’s looked into MSG—the FDA, the World Health Organization, the American Medical Association—has concluded the same thing: it’s safe. Harmless as table salt for the vast majority of people.

Sure, some folks are sensitive to it, just like some people can’t handle caffeine or dairy. But dangerous? About as dangerous as a butterfly landing on your nose.

The Asian Capitulation

Now here’s where the story takes a turn that would make Kafka weep. The anti-MSG hysteria that started in America spread like wildfire back to Asia—the very place where MSG was born.

Asian food companies, desperate to crack into Western markets, started slapping “NO MSG” labels on their products like they were badges of honor. They bought into the Western lie so completely that they began to reject their own culinary heritage.

It was a perfect example of what happens when you let other people’s fears become your reality. The tail wagging the dog, you might say, if the tail was ignorance and the dog was an entire continent’s worth of culinary tradition.

The Long Road Back

But truth, as they say, has a way of surfacing, like a body in a lake.

In recent years, voices have started speaking up. Comedians like Nigel Ng, with his Uncle Roger character, have made Americans laugh at their own MSG phobia. Major media outlets have started acknowledging what scientists have known all along: the fear of MSG was built on prejudice, not facts.

Even Ajinomoto got in on the act with a clever social media campaign called #CancelPizza. They made conspiracy-theory style videos pointing out that pizza—beloved, all-American pizza—is loaded with natural MSG from its tomatoes, mushrooms, and cheese. The campaign was brilliant in its simplicity: it forced people to confront their own hypocrisy.

The Moral of Our Story

So what’s the lesson here, besides the obvious one about not believing everything you read?

It’s this: fear is a hungry thing. It feeds on ignorance and grows fat on prejudice. Given the right conditions—a respected publication, a sensational story, and a population already primed to believe the worst about “the other”—fear can take on a life of its own.

The MSG scare wasn’t really about food safety. It was about us—about our willingness to accept comfortable lies over uncomfortable truths, about our readiness to blame outsiders for problems that existed mainly in our own heads.

Even now, in 2025, you can walk into restaurants and see those “NO MSG” signs proudly displayed like badges of honor. The lie persists, even as the truth slowly spreads.

But that’s the thing about truth—it’s patient. It can wait. And eventually, like morning light burning away the shadows, it illuminates all the dark corners where our fears like to hide.

The white powder that haunted America for more than fifty years was never the real monster. The real monster was the one we carried inside ourselves all along.

And that, friends, is a horror story for the ages.