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Jun 16 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
#RegenesisFact 17: Monosodium glutamate is bad for you, right? Or so many people think. But the claim arose not from a scientific study, but a deliberate hoax in 1968 by a US prankster called Howard Steel.🧵
Glutamate is a very common amino acid, present in many of the foods we eat. So how did we become so afraid of it?
Steel was bet $10 by a colleague that he couldn’t publish a spoof letter in the New England Journal of Medicine. He thought it would be funny to invent something he called Chinese Restaurant Syndrome, a set of imaginary symptoms "experienced" after eating a Chinese meal.
He used the name Robert Ho Man Kwok, because he thought it sounded like “Human Crock”. He claimed to belong to a research foundation that was entirely fictitious. Though he peppered the letter with hints and jokes, amazingly the journal published it.
He claimed that the made-up syndrome was caused by monosodium glutamate. After the letter was published, and its claims widely repeated, many people began experiencing the symptoms: a powerful example of auto-suggestion. Ralph Nader lobbied Congress to ban MSG.
50 years later, in 2018, Steel confessed to the prank. But the damage had been done. Business at Chinese restaurants was suppressed for years. I expect many went bust as a result of the scare.
Why was this hoax taken seriously, and believed by so many people, despite the obvious hints and complete absence of evidence? Probably a number of reasons. They’re likely to include the neophobia that often surrounds new food technologies, and racism.
The prank is likely to have meshed with racist tropes about foreign food and Chinese business practices.
It shows how careful we should be about kneejerk reactions to new technologies and scientific names for ingredients.
Source: Daniel Soar, 2021. The Sixth Taste. London Review of Books Vol. 43 No. 17. lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/…
This story appears to be even worse than I thought. @domgreves has pointed me to this article, which alleges that Howard Steel tried to close the hoax down a few weeks after his letter was published, but was rebuffed by the letters editor of the NEJM. news.colgate.edu/magazine/2019/…

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More from @GeorgeMonbiot

George Monbiot Profile picture
Jun 16
This is the worst land use proposal I've ever seen in the UK. @ecotricity wants to use 6 million hectares of land here for biogas made from grass. That's bigger than the UK's entire arable area. The ecological and carbon opportunity costs are astronomical. ecotricity.co.uk/our-green-ener…
Yet the company resolutely ignores these costs, and brushes off the scheme's critics. Already biogas production in this country, for which grass silage is one of the feedstocks, is a massive problem, using land that would be better used either to feed people or for rewilding ....
and causing repeated pollution disasters when the digestate (the residue), which is highly concentrated, is spread on fields.
@ecotricity calls this "green gas". It's the opposite.
The company is trashing its green credentials and heading for a massive fight with campaigners.
Read 15 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
Jun 16
In all these cases, we should see the bigger picture. How much land is being used to produce how much food? In the absence of numbers, I suspect this is a formula for massive agricultural sprawl, as land that could otherwise support wild ecosystems is used for low-yield grazing.
All farming inflicts an ecological opportunity cost. The more extensive it is (the higher the land : food production ratio), the greater the cost. A great weight of evidence shows that the abundance and diversity of wild ecosystems is much greater than that of cattle pastures.
The same applies to carbon opportunity cost: if instead this land were used to support wild ecosystems, it would draw down far more CO2 from the air. theccc.org.uk/publication/la…
Read 6 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
Jun 14
#RegenesisFact 16: Probably as a result of a disastrous combination of extreme inequality and the failure to regulate the food industry effectively, 5-year old boys in the UK are on average shorter than those in any comparable nation. 🧵 Image
Girls in the UK are the second shortest. Put crudely, our kids are stunted. Image
Height is a good proxy for health and life outcomes. Our children are in a bad state, and are likely to stay that way, by comparison to their peers elsewhere, for life. This is an entirely amendable issue, but successive governments have chosen to neglect it.
Read 9 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
Jun 9
#RegenesisFact 15: How many chickens do you reckon are killed every year in the UK?
1 million? No.
10 million? No.
100 million? No.
1 billion.
Yes. 1 billion.
And even this meets only 75% of our demand. The rest are imported.
The number slaughtered in this country has risen by 300 milllion since 2003.
And how do you reckon they’re produced? Like this? No.
Read 9 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
Jun 7
For too long, I neglected this issue. But, after investigating three aspects of the problem, I've come to a disturbing conclusion:
Even if we arrest and reverse climate and ecological breakdown, without determined action, synthetic chemicals will destroy much of life on Earth.🧵
Here's my latest article involving the release of synthetic chemicals, and their devastating impacts on sealife. I've no idea what the effects might be on people who eat contaminated shellfish. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Here's the previous article I wrote, on the spreading of synthetic chemicals on land, and their devastating impacts on soil and aquatic life. I've no idea what the effects might be on people who eat contaminated crops. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Read 6 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
Jun 6
I'm sorry to keep doing this to you, but this is another deeply shocking and disgusting story, that urgently needs our attention. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
It looks like a major government cover-up, whose purpose could be to pave the way for the giant entrepot for organised crime it's planning: the Teesside Freeport.
Ooh, that's a clever, sneaky move. The day after I pressed @DefraGovUK on why it refused to release its report, it published it, but without telling me or making any public announcement. This now allows Defra to say: "Monbiot's talking rubbish, it's already in the public domain."
Read 8 tweets

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