Anyone here know anything about monosodium glutamate, any studies, etc?
@148 I.Q. Magical Thinker ?
The Sixth Taste
There is some reason to doubt the story Daniel Soar tells about the origins of the controversy around monosodium glutamate (
LRB, 9 September). Public concern over the adverse effects of MSG consumption began with a letter sent to the
New England Journal of Medicine in 1968 signed by Dr Robert Ho Man Kwok. In 2018, Howard Steel, another doctor, claimed that he had invented Dr Kwok and written the letter as a joke. However, the US radio programme
This American Life debunked Steel’s claim by contacting Kwok’s family (Kwok himself died in 2014). Very recently, a writer for the
Washington Post interviewed Kwok’s daughter, who explained that Kwok had written to the journal because he ‘wanted to figure out what was causing this reaction’.
Jordan Sand
Washington DC
Daniel Soar writes: The dead get the last laugh. As Jordan Sand says, two people claimed to have written the infamous letter. One died in 2014 and can’t be interrogated. The other died four years later, at the age of 97, and can’t be interrogated again. But he – Howard Steel, or Howard Steel’s ghost – can be heard speaking on that episode of
This American Life. In the voicemail he left, there’s at least a record of his side of the story. It’s a bit like the old brainteaser about Portia’s caskets: either he was telling the truth, or he was lying about having lied. A hoax? Or a hoax about having perpetrated a hoax? It’s a puzzle that can never be solved. Believe whichever ghost you want to, but one of them, I find, whispers more persuasively.