SIRC Media Watch Archive
The Pick – July 2005

If MSG is so bad for you, why doesn’t everyone in Asia have a headache? Alex Renton investigates the world’s longest lasting food scare. 1968 was a good year for rebels, and the dawn of MSG-phobia coincides with the beginning of a great shift in middle-class consumers’ thinking - a withdrawal of our faith in the vast corporations that fed and medicated us. At no time has any official body, governmental or academic, ever found it necessary to warn humans against consuming MSG. But popular opinion has travelled - spectacularly - in the opposite direction to science. Observer