The Delhi High Court recently blocked the release of the movie “Ajinomoto” when a Japanese seasoning company claimed that the movie violated their 113-year-old registered trademark, “AJI-NO-MOTO,” which is largely used for monosodium glutamate, one of its main products.
The seasoning’s creators further asserted that using the phrase to indicate a negative quality, as the filmmakers proposed, “is bound to strongly prejudice” against the product.
Professor of Chemistry Kikunae Ikeda of Tokyo’s Imperial University contacted Suzuki Pharmaceutical in 1908 to ask for assistance in commercialising a food additive he had been working on. Ikeda had been wondering what caused the kelp, an algae, to have such a unique flavour.
It is said that while he savoured a dish of boiling tofu in kelp broth, he was persuaded that there was another fundamental flavour that was very dissimilar from sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. He gave it the Japanese word for tasty, umami, as a play on words.
One of the most prevalent amino acids in food and the human body is glutamate, which Ikeda discovered via his research. It was changed to monosodium glutamate by adding a dash of sodium (MSG). The compound’s culinary potential was confirmed by a tasting.
The hydrochloric acid-based seasoning Ajinomoto, created in less than a year, received patent office approval. Saburosuke Suzuki, the former CEO of Suzuki Pharma, chose the name, which means “quintessence of flavour.”
Ajinomoto was brought to Hawaii by Japanese immigrants, and it was brought to North America by the Chinese diaspora. Henry Low, who is frequently credited with inventing the egg roll, listed it as one of the five “Chinese staples one needed to start cooking Chinese in an American kitchen” in his 1938 book “Cook at Home in Chinese.” Low had served as an apprentice at a Chinese food shop in New York City’s Chinatown ten years earlier.
When American soldiers stationed in Japan during the Second World War returned home, the country saw another surge in popularity. The American military was likewise at this time looking for ways to enhance the taste of the soldiers’ tasteless food supplies.
But when the food safety and environmental movements gained traction in the West in the late 1960s, particularly in the US, consumer confidence in food products containing chemicals began to erode. They occasionally coincided, unintentionally, with some of the racist tendencies prevalent at the time in the US: The “Chinese restaurant syndrome” started to be used to describe symptoms including numbness and a rapid heartbeat. Ajinomoto sales decreased in the 1970s for the first time in forty years. However, this was also the time that MSG was expanding outside, such as to India.
Despite the fact that MSG has been deemed safe by food safety organisations like the US FDA, it nevertheless has its critics. Even though revisionist culinary studies have shown that much of the negative press Ajinomoto received was caused by shoddy “food safety studies” that utilised five to 30 times the typical amount, the sceptics still remain. MSG exists naturally in everything we eat, including tomatoes, as noted by scientist Krish Ashok, author of the wildly popular culinary science book Masala Labs.
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