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I wish people stopped invoking racism everywhere, when plain "being misinformed" explains things just fine. Millions of Koreans swear up and down that MSG is bad for health. Are we also being racist? (Against whom?)

wwweston 2006 days ago

Does anyone who swears that MSG is bad for health do so because they personally hold anti-chinese racist views? Probably not.

Is it possible that:

* the MSG mythology in some Western nation was proposed by those with some degree of bias against foreign things or chinese cuisine or people specifically

* it caught on and was repeated by people who were enthusiastic about it because of some degree of that bias

* MSG was attended to in some food but not in others because of some degree of that bias

* as this reached critical mass in western culture the idea became common wisdom even among those with no particular bias and exported anywhere that western culture has reach

People sometimes refer to this kind of construction as "systemic" racism. The majority of people subscribing to the myth might be entirely innocent of any kind of identifiable racial stereotyping or discrimination and yet inputs from people who are might be enough to tip the system that way.

Maybe there's other equally credible explanations, but this one is hardly incredible.

reitzensteinm 2006 days ago

It totally is systemic racism.

But I wish there was another word for it, or that racism were not used interchangeably with systemic racism.

There's a hell of a difference between "you're racist" and "you're spreading misinformation that only exists because your grandparents were racist".

The latter will get a reaction from the vast majority of people like "oh shit, I had no idea, that's awful". The former will cause anger, frustration, defensiveness and denial.

If the idea is to get everyone on board with the idea that the deck is still stacked against minorities even in the absence of conscious contemporary racism (which I believe to be true), telling people they're racist is probably the worst way to go about that.

> If the idea is to get everyone on board with the idea that the deck is still stacked against minorities even in the absence of conscious contemporary racism (which I believe to be true)

Chinese Americans have higher incomes than white people on average. In terms of income mobility: Vietnamese Americans who came here in the 1970s as refugees went from being among the poorest groups in the country, to parity with white Americans today. Asian Americans are richer, have higher income mobility, and live longer than white Americans. Once you adjust for age and citizenship status, they’re also pretty close to evenly represented among billionaires and Fortune 500 board members.

That is not to say they don’t face unpleasant racism, xenophobia, and stereotypes. But saying “the deck is stacked against them” is a much stronger statement. It implies a structural racism that impairs prosperity. While some minority groups do face such structural racism, specifically, Black and indigenous people, others do not: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353.

https://reason.com/2020/11/16/equity-report-north-thurston-a...

Thurston County in WA, which is the seat of the state capital, has decided Asian people are not “people of color” anymore because they’re doing too well.

Oh it’s worse than that: https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-school-be-antiracist-a-new-...

Under a policy proposal by the Evanston, IL superintendent, white and Asian students would be held behind doing remote learning while other students were prioritized for return to in-class education. When people opposed the policy, they were called racists. The condemnation was worse for Asians who objected to their kids being given a worse educational experience on account of their race—they were called, in essence, traitors to non-white solidarity.

Critical theory has some really f—ked up premises about Asians. The classical liberal, even left-liberal view, doesn’t require an explanation for Asian economic success. Asians don’t face the legacy of say Jim Crow, and the American system is otherwise basically fair, so Asians have been able to prosper even if roadblocks have hampered other groups.

Under critical theory, however, the country and its institutions are considered systematically racist and white supremacist. That creates a dilemma with respect to Asians. How can they have prospered in a system of white supremacy? The solution is to suppose that whites “allowed Asians to succeed” to “serve as a wedge with other non-whites.” Asians are thus stripped of agency—their success isn’t their own, but instead the byproduct of a ploy by whites.

Therefore, when an Asian complains when his child must continue distance learning while other students return to in-person education, they’re not merely being self-centered. They’re not merely failing to acknowledge that other kids suffer from disadvantages that their own children don’t. That would be the typical liberal view. In the critical theory view, they are collaborators. They owe their status due to white supremacy and they’re complicit in white supremacy unless they act in solidarity with other non-whites. Even if that means suffering disadvantageous treatment in schools, etc.

ineedasername 2006 days ago

It's very strange to qualify the "of color" designation on the basis of socioeconomic parity.

Are multi generational pockets of poverty-stricken caucasians granted "of color" status by Thurston County?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_pay_gap_in_the_United_S...

ineedasername 2006 days ago

It could impair prosperity for Asians. Comparing raw average income alone isn't sufficient to settle the question. Consider the counterfactual possibility that Asians might be even more prosperous with even higher income if not for structural racism. I fact, it seems that Asians do make as much as 8% less than others in comparable jobs [0] though that difference may disappear somewhat for Asians born in the US, indicating a more complex dynamic than discrimination on appearance alone.

> Asians still make 8% less than whites in comparable jobs except for Asians who have been in the United States for one and a half generations, whom have reached full parity in income.

This sounds like the difference is due to things like immigration status and citizenship, not race. Most Asians are immigrants, and many aren’t citizens. That limits opportunities quite a bit even within the realm of “comparable” jobs.

lifeformed 2006 days ago

Economic prosperity isn't the only metric that matters. Racism isn't just about money - the deck can also be stacked in social, cultural, and political ways.

rubicon33 2006 days ago

It's called being biased, misinformed, or at worst stereotyping, and it used to be accepted that everyone does it and it's not the end of the world that your aunt from Wisconson thinks MSG gives her hives.

Nowadays that aunt is racist, her whole family is racist, and it's the reason why everyone else can't get ahead in life.

neilparikh 2006 days ago

> it used to be accepted that everyone does it and it's not the end of the world that your aunt from Wisconson thinks MSG gives her hives

I think you're taking the accusation of racism as much stronger than it actually is. No one has claimed that this is uncommon, or "the end of the world", or "her whole family is racist", or "it's the reason everyone else can't get ahead in life". They've simply said it's racist, and that claim seems uncontroversial given the definitions.

For example, if it turned out someone gave 1 cents more on average to white vs non-white beggars (due to unconscious racial biases), that would clearly be racist, but it also wouldn't be the end of the world, and I don't think person would be a particularly bad person.

If something fits the definition of racism, it doesn't become not racism just because someone feels attacked by calling it racism.

Now, in common parlance, racism is a loaded word, so I don't think it's advisable to call someone racist over these issues, and I wouldn't do so. But that doesn't mean we should censor ourselves when discussing these topics in the abstract. Otherwise, we're basically practicing political correctness.

rubicon33 2005 days ago

Totally agree. The problem is that the word "racism" has meant a lot of things over the decades continues to be used to describe many gradations of behavior and outlook. It's used to describe brutally beating a black man to death in the street, it's meant denying housing opportunity, and it also describes moving to the other side of the sidewalk when a black man is on your side, or picking a white candidate over a black candidate in a job interview.

The spectrum that the word "racist" covers is simply too large.

That's why I've pointed out that it used to just be called "stereotyping" but there's been a concerted effort on the part of those pushing identity politics, to make this about power. It's to the point where they've redefined "racism" to mean "at a minimum, stereotyping another person from a position of power or authority".

The implications of that new definition are that many people who were previously guilty of stereotyping, are now racist. In fact, basically any white person who stereotypes, because they generally have privileges' and power in society, are now "racist".

I don't agree with the redefinition, and I think it's an example of a pendulum that has swung too far.

ineedasername 2006 days ago

I might agree that the pendulum has swung too far, but we also now have a better understanding of how bias and stereotyping can nonetheless be damaging. though yes, racism is much too loaded of a term to be thrown around the way it currently is. If you admit to no gradations, well that's when you get cancel culture, when a joke in poor taste that might reveal some bias can result in the same consequences as blatant hate speech.

rubicon33 2006 days ago

Totally. Some might even say it was a necessary evil, that the pendulum swung far, for progress to be made.

I'm glad that society as a whole recognizes systemic "racism" and how unfair the world is for many. I'd love nothing more than for us as a world community to move toward a reality that is a true meritocracy and equal opportunity isn't just a buzz word. Who can honestly say they enjoy unfair advantage? No one.

That said, not everything is a product of your race/gender. We have a long way to go and I hope we don't eat each other before we get there. The cancel culture and reverse racism that I'm seeing is an unfortunate side effect of "progress".

JKCalhoun 2006 days ago

Maybe. But I have observed that so many cameras in people's pockets the past decade have shown us no evidence of UFOs nor of Bigfoot — but holy hell Black men do get killed when arrested disproportionately in the U.S..

AnthonyMouse 2006 days ago

> But I wish there was another word for it, or that racism were not used interchangeably with systemic racism.

Especially where in this case it's much more like systemic culturalism.

Suppose the same thing had happened, but rather than the initial dispute being between the vendors of British food and the vendors of Chinese food, it was between the vendors of British food and the vendors of Italian food. So you would have a lot of people believing that they're allergic to the gluten in pasta, when almost none of them really are, and also ignoring that plenty of British food contains gluten as well.

It would be pretty hard to argue that as racism unless you're using a definition of racism not characteristically used in America, but you can still imagine the same thing happening in the same way. So what does that tell you?

JohnBooty 2006 days ago

    But I wish there was another word for it, 
    or that racism were not used interchangeably 
    with systemic racism.

I understand both sides of the argument.

Many people learned an overly simplistic definition of "racism" at some point. Essentially, "overt racism" or "active racism" -- using slurs, joining the KKK, refusing to hire people of a certain race, etc.

Anything less overt than this is not "racism" to them. Having generally steered clear of such actions in their lives, they are dismayed to consider the possibility that there are a lot of other institutions and individual actions that are racist.

We could invent a new term for "systemic racism." But, ultimately, it's still racism. To the people experiencing it, it has the same net result as other forms of racism. If a white person in a predominantly white society doesn't hire you because you're non-white, there's no material difference to you whether that person did it for overt, conscious reasons or otherwise. That is why is it is useful to think of systemic racism as racism, rather than inventing a new word for it.

Here's an interesting thought experiment. Think of the people in your life who are vehemently opposed to the use of the term "racism" to include systemic racism. Suppose we actually did invent a new term for systemic racism so that they could feel more comfortable. How do we think these people would respond?

I think a significant number of them would complain about the new term just as much. I can hear them now in my mind. "First we have to worry about being 'racist', now we have to worry about $SOME_NEW_TERM!?!? What will 'they' think of next?!?"

Because it's not really about words for them. It's about a refusal to examine their own actions.

rayiner 2005 days ago

The distinction isn’t between overt and passive. The traditional definition of “racism” still includes “implicit bias.”

The recent distinction is between “prejudice” and “effect on racial equity.” Ibram Kendi distills the view quite clearly. He explains that the lower tax rate for capital gains is “racist.” He doesn’t say it’s motivated by racial prejudice (either overt or implicit), or deny that it’s nearly universal in the developed world, including in non-white countries. What he means is that the tax preference has the effect of delivering more benefits to white people because white people are more likely to own capital assets.

In the traditional view, by contrast, racism is a mental state—it’s an attitude that’s held by people, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Studies show that these attitudes, what’s now called “prejudice,” is probably overstated and isn’t the dominant driver of racial differences: https://www.chronicle.com/article/can-we-really-measure-impl....

The recent approach has been to reuse “racism” to refer to systems that create or perpetuate racial disparities whether or not they’re motivated by what’s now called prejudice.

An example of this usage is saying that “standardized testing is racist.” To people familiar with the traditional definition, this implies that test makers have racial prejudice and, consciously or unconsciously, designed tests to hinder minorities. Under the new definition, this just means that the practice of using standardized tests perpetuates racial disparities because it hurts students that have suffered disadvantages.

Of course we had words for this before. I studied what would now be called “environmental racism” in law school. We would say “minority communities suffer disproportionately negative effects from the siting of coal plants.” We don’t need to come up with a new term for this, as you speculate. That’s a concept I could easily explain to my Trump-voting in laws and they’d get it. But when you call that “racism” that implies (not only to my in laws, but to my Biden voting non-white dad) that people involved in the siting decisions were motivated by racial prejudice. They’d say, “no, they’re just putting the coal plant where the land is cheapest.” Under the traditional view, a decision like that based on purely objective, relevant, non-race factors can’t be “racist” because that concept refers to a state of mind (whether overt or implicit).

Now, there is a logic to academics and activists using the term “racism” for that. As you observe, the effect on the groups themselves is similar. Most important, by framing “racism” in terms of effects rather than mental state, it forces a consideration of racial equity impacts on otherwise race-neutral policies.

JohnBooty 2005 days ago

That is one of the best and most succinct descriptions I've read. Bravo.

I mean that sincerely. I'm afraid it may read as sarcasm, but it is not.

    Of course we had words for this before. I studied 
    what would now be called “environmental racism” 
    in law school. We would say “minority communities 
    suffer disproportionately negative effects from 
    the siting of coal plants.”

“Minority communities suffer disproportionately negative effects from the siting of coal plants” is a nice description of that specific thing. What about more general construction and zoning choices that aren't about coal plants? What about systemic practices in general that have disproportionately negative effects on minorities? I don't feel we had an overarching term for those phenomena, besides "rascism." Language, but not a term.

    The recent approach has been to reuse “racism” to refer to 
    systems that create or perpetuate racial disparities whether 
    or not they’re motivated by what’s now called prejudice.

The approach has changed, but how much?

Whether the year is 1860 or 1960 or 2020, surely even the most fundamental understanding of racism has always required an understanding of both intent and effect.

When I was in school in the 1990s, we learned about the many "kindly" slaveowners who viewed themselves as benevolent caretakers of their slaves, whom they viewed as simple savages that would not prosper on their own. We learned how race-based humor could have innocent intent but negative consequences. And so on. The frequent dissonance between intent and effect was in my opinion vastly underemphasized, but this was not a new line of thought even 30 years ago.

    [The coal plant thing] is a concept I could easily explain 
    to my Trump-voting  in laws and they’d get it. But when you 
    call that “racism” that implies (not only to my in laws, but 
    to my Biden voting  non-white dad) that people involved in the 
    siting decisions were motivated by racial prejudice. They’d 
    say, “no, they’re just putting the coal plant where the land 
    is cheapest.”

The practical argument for calling this something other than "racism" is, essentially, that we need to make things more palatable for folks in order to help them understand the effects of their actions.

I would certainly agree that labeling such acts as racism precludes many people from understanding these concepts. We have been taught that racism is one of the greatest of transgressions and nobody wants to think of themselves as racist. I don't even think many members of white nationalist groups even consider themselves "racist."

1MachineElf 2006 days ago

It's not systemic racism, it's the headache I get from excess glutamate. My family is Chinese. Don't @ me.

avs733 2006 days ago

When I tell people “you’re on fire” They do just fine differentiating when I’m complementing their golf game and when I’m literally telling them they are aflame.

On the surface your suggestion of a different word seems reasonable but it’s not.

People are perfectly capable of choosing to seek understanding of nuanced use of words and phrases. The fact that they disengage rather than doing so is not the responsibility of the speaker.

an_opabinia 2006 days ago

MSG aversion is relatively new. People’s attitudes about it change over the scale of decades. This is pretty consistent with most other food additives, like aspartame, certain preservatives and certain food colorings. While I agree there exists racism against Asian Americans in many places, it would behoove people who feel passionate about the elimination of prejudice around the world to fight for things not because of how they interface with ignorant people (ie because all ignorant people seem to like good Chinese food, like all other human beings) but because the goal is worthy. And personally, “greater acceptance of MSG as a food additive in Chinese food as opposed to Doritos” is better achieved by better marketing, clearly.

Yes, there’s a strong, recurring aversion to food additives that doesn’t require racism as an explanation. I think the MSG/Chinese connection was because the restaurants would add it to their dishes, which was at the time kind a unique thing - even though many processed foods contain MSG, having it added to your prepared food would be as strange as them adding Yellow #5 to your dish, and the reaction no different. There’s a quality of integrity to prepared dishes that most all but the modernist restaurants trade upon. Chemical additives, in the days Red Dye #2 scares and the rest hardly need a racist explanation to understand the aversion.

Ensorceled 2006 days ago

> MSG aversion is relatively new.

I encountered the "MSG is Harmful" trope in university in the 1980's ... it's literally been around for generations now.

shoyer 2006 days ago

Not being a “conscious racist” doesn’t make you any less racist. Racism isn’t about intentions, it’s about consequences. It’s a convenient slight of to pretend otherwise.

zdragnar 2006 days ago

"Racism isn’t about intentions"

Appropriating words to steal the emotional strength of them for your own, novel concept is silly. Not everyone will buy the new definition, and you'll end up with two groups yelling at each other, about different things, with no common understanding.

If you cannot read "racism isn't about intentions" and not laugh, you are doing yourself a disservice.

sellyme 2006 days ago

> Maybe there's other equally credible explanations

While I have very little doubt that xenophobia was a large factor in the hysteria over MSG in the United States, there's definitely no need for a "Maybe" here. Just look at the "pink goop" claims about McNuggets that range from two decades out of date to completely falsified - people are willing to believe all kinds of nonsense that fits their preconceived notions.

KMag 2006 days ago

See also the number of people who believe they have a gluten sensitivity or peanut allergy, or who are worried about the pH of their food, etc., etc. A large segment of the US population has been conditioned to be paranoid about food. A rise in self-diagnosis combined with the placebo effect when testing a self-diagnosis certainly hasn't helped matters.

Frost1x 2006 days ago

I think we need to create new language for dealing with these sorts of cases to differentiate what's being said.

When you make a claim that a statement someone makes displays racism, that usually implies indirectly that the speaker is actively/knowingly/intentionally being racist. Being a racist voluntarily implies a lot of negative baggage. It often implies not only ignorance but more consequently, unjustified: bigotry, hatred, willingness to commit violent acts against another on this bias, and so forth.

When you promote an idea that happens to prop up or create institutional racism, the vast majority share only one feature: ignorance. We're all ignorant of somethings to different degrees so I wouldn't put a scarlet letter like "racist" on someone due to ignorance. Unfortunately, this also sets the stage for sociopaths to push academic dishonesty, to essentially truly be racist in the traditional sense and promote/support features of institutional racism while feigning ignorance, so you'll get some false negatives, but I think it seems reasonable.

I'm not exactly sure what the term, phrase, or linguistics should be but I think something new and distinct from "racist" and "racism" needs to be developed, otherwise the terms become wild cards for any and every type of bias that may arise, even if the bias has no real intent of being racist, directly or indirectly. The more you throw "racism" and "racist" around outside the well established context, the less power it carries in language. Right now it carries a lot of weight still and I don't want to see that language lose its power.

eli 2006 days ago

You don’t have to knowingly possess a racist motive to be racist.

Frost1x 2006 days ago

I think you do, otherwise this opens the door to anyone and everyone being a "racist" by some secondary, tertiary, or nth order effect. Essentially everyone would have some degree associated with them of how racist they are.

I propose the following question: are people who eat at Chik-fil-A anti-LGBT (specifically gay) rights because they financially support a business through continued purchases that support anti-LGBTQ activities? Probably not (some are, a lot of people... just like their chicken sandwiches). I'm LGBTQ and I occasionally eat one of their chicken sandwiches. Customers may be indirectly supporting systemic opposition of LGBTQ rights, but I think most average people aren't looking at these n-th degree removed effects, nor could anyone be asked to all the time (I think consumers are being a bit too negligent on this front but that's another story).

From a few studies I've read, it's actually harmful to give small sums of money to homeless panhandlers because it perpetuates their situation where higher volumes of money and support services are needed to actually help them. Does that mean people who donate money to homeless people are trying to keep them homeless or cause harm, if that's exactly what handing a panhandler a $20 bill does? Probably not.

We don't have words for these types of biases (systemic or not), but if we did, I don't think it's reasonable to claim anyone who has any n-th order contribution that sways a bias one way or another happens to be anti-whatever to the degree racists are against the basically fictional concept of "race." Every action you take likely helps someone and hurts someone else and the same could be said about inaction.

Motive and intent are quite important IMHO. Both are incredibly difficult (if not impossible) to prove undeniably but the advantage of many racists is that they're actually proud to be racist and tell you their intent.

mlyle 2006 days ago

> > You don’t have to knowingly possess a racist motive to be racist.

> I think you do, otherwise this opens the door to anyone and everyone being a "racist" by some secondary, tertiary, or nth order effect.

Surely there's something in-between. Say, perhaps, black people make you uncomfortable, such that you're inclined against hiring them and you preferentially hire whites instead. Then, you wouldn't knowingly possess a racist motive but would be definitely acting racist and perpetuating racism.

Everyone has, from their own point of view, good motives and intentions.

AnthonyMouse 2006 days ago

> Surely there's something in-between. Say, perhaps, black people make you uncomfortable, such that you're inclined against hiring them and you preferentially hire whites instead. Then, you wouldn't knowingly possess a racist motive but would be definitely acting racist and perpetuating racism.

That seems pretty clearly to be a racist motive. "Black people make you uncomfortable" is literally traditional racism, and action taken based on that motive is racist. Doing something like that without thinking through your intentions too hard doesn't make the act unintentional, because the intent is there whether you consciously evaluate it or not, and it doesn't change the motive. That person wants to be racist, and then directly is.

Someone who buys a chicken sandwich only because they want a chicken sandwich has no such motive or intent.

lliamander 2006 days ago

> Everyone has, from their own point of view, good motives and intentions.

And you will almost always make more progress by addressing those sincere motives than you will by labeling them racist.

eli 2004 days ago

Motive and intent are not important to the person being discriminated against.

Not getting a job because the hiring manager is outwardly racist and not getting a job because the hiring manager worries you're a poor "culture fit" or that your HBCU degree isn't prestigious enough has the same effect on the job applicant.

optimiz3 2006 days ago

Ah yes the modern version of original sin.

wpietri 2006 days ago

I used to think the same way. But now that I see how pervasive a force racism has been in America's history, I have a different view. Now I think it's worth asking both questions: Is racism really at play? And given America's lasting, endemic racism, is there reason to think something makes it absent in a given case?

A couple of the books that turned me around here: Kendi's "Stamped from the Beginning", a history of racist ideas. And Loewen's "Sundown Towns", a look at the wave of ethnic cleansing during the Nadir that happened across America. I had known about the Tulsa Massacre, but what I didn't know was how common smaller-scale events were for decades.

I’m really not sure there is a sound conclusion to be drawn from comparing the Tulsa Massacre to people being skeptical of food from a different culture. The former is something that’s a unique and very ugly aspect of American history. The latter is pretty much universal.[1] You can squint and lump both things under the umbrella of “racism” but they’re so different as to be two completely different kind of things. And I don’t think it’s particularly useful to analyze both through the same lens.

Note that when Kendi talks about “racism” he’s talking about anti-Black racism specifically. I think folks try to generalize his ideas in a way that goes beyond what he actually purports to address.

[1] My Bangladeshi mom had a tinge of skepticism upon first learning my girlfriend (now wife) was from Oregon, “because they eat snakes.”

chanakya 2006 days ago

I'd go even further and say that just because America has a history of racism and racist ideas does not mean that racism continues to be a major factor today. I've read Kendi, and he offers scant evidence that it is.

Why would you expect a scholarly 500-year history of racist ideas to offer evidence of racism's existence today?

chanakya 2005 days ago

I didn't mean his books on history. In the last 15 months or so, he's also published 3(!) books on racism in contemporary society.

Good thing that's not what I said, then. I pointed you at an endemic, centuries-long pattern of widespread American racism. You reduced it to one landmark event and then dismissed it.

It is also true that people are skeptical of different foods period. But more than one thing can be be happening at once.

rayiner 2005 days ago

You pointed to a book that focuses on racism arising out of the enslavement of Black people in America and subsequent events over 500 years, in an article addressing the MSG myth. My point is that whatever inferences you can draw from that aren't usefully generalized to Americans being skeptical of what Chinese restaurants put in their food.

Skepticism of foreigners and the food they eat is universal to human societies. Enslavement of a distinct minority group, amounting to 1/8 of the population, for hundreds of years, and the social and economic consequences that remain when slavery ends and the groups must subsequently live alongside each other, is sui generis. It's not analytically useful to look at both things through the same lens. The causes, consequences, dynamics, and solutions are more or less completely different.

Skepticism of Chinese food ingredients is much better understood through the lens of the experience of prior generations of immigrants: Germans, Irish, Italians, etc. Anti-German antagonism in World War II accelerated uptake of English in German-speaking communities in the midwest and caused people to change their names; JFK's candidacy was met with charges of Popery; and people were actually quite skeptical of Italian food and unfamiliar ingredients like garlic.

I pointed to two books that helped me understand a pervasive phenomenon in America. I agree I can't generalize two books to all of everything. But then, I didn't do that. There's an ocean of scholarship on this.

That you keep building straw men out of what I say makes me think this is not a great use of my time.

Frondo 2006 days ago

Before you edited your comment, you said something about Americans being very willing to embrace foods from cultures around the world. For some reason, that remark reminded me of one of the talking points of the 2016 election, the specter of "taco trucks on every corner," and how the Republican campaign that year suggested that that'd be a bad thing.

Trump throws a lot of stuff at the wall to see what sticks. That one didn’t even register with his own base. I remember having lunch one day in central Illinois—a rural county that went for Trump by 20 points this year. The most popular restaurant in town was a Mexican place. Even Breitbart likes taco trucks: https://www.breitbart.com/health/2020/09/17/video-daughter-h...

strogonoff 2006 days ago

Perhaps it would help knowing that dislike for MSG flavor enhancer is also a thing in other countries besides the US, and can happen without any exposure to Chinese food whatsoever.

It is justified with following reasoning. If:

1. I trust that my body will enjoy the taste of well-prepared food from healthy fresh ingredients, and will inform me when I ate enough.

2. MSG makes anything taste better.

It follows that:

3. With MSG added, my body can be fooled into eating unhealthy food and it can be fooled into wanting more food than it needs.

4. All else equal, I will assume that a chef who does not use MSG is more skilful than a chef who does.

This logic may well be faulty, superstitious, misinformed, etc., but what it is not is racist.

(Addendum: “Chinese restaurant syndrome” is a different thing though, and unlike basic distaste for MSG it does give off an antagonistic vibe. It’s interesting that it happens in the US of all places—I bet many people around the world associate MSG first and foremost with snacks from American brands like Pringles.)

BoiledCabbage 2006 days ago

I think you've hit on the true issue.

The majority of people have only leared on a superficial level of of the intertwined racism of America's past - often times mostly the light touches they learned in elementary school. And what's taught in elementary school is intentionally simplified to something deemed appropriate for children. Some summary of slavery is bad, MLK, Rosa Parks, sit-ins...

Most people don't actually learn anything about American's history and ties with racism at an adult level. So instead people think they know the history of it, and as a result think (based on what they've learned) it's overblown.

Anyone I know who has actually taken time as an adult to read about American history and its relationship with racism, comes away with a very different view point.

It's so intertwined it's incredible.

That was certainly my experience. What I learned about racism up through high school was basically, "This stuff happened, but long ago and far away, unconnected to what's going on around you."

And it's no coincidence that I learned this in a suburban school with a student body that was 1% black. In a state that was 14% black. And that had a long history of racial exclusion and white flight.

I'm shocked now at how one-sided my initial education was on this. Shocked, but not surprised.

Are they for different reasons? What is the reason Koreans think it's bad for health? As I haven't read about that.

Given that in the west it was also dubbed "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" I would think some form of prejudice played a part.

> What is the reason Koreans think it's bad for health?

Pretty much the same reason why Americans think it's bad for health. It has a scary-sounding name (it's also called "MSG" in Korea), it sounds like a "chemical", and you can find it in ingredient lists of all popular junk foods - most notably instant ramen, which is basically an MSG+salt solution masquerading as noodles.

Give something in food an exotic name, and people will invent reason to fear it, like all those people demanding gluten-free bread.

Besides, if "racism" is the explanation behind it, how are you going to explain the immense popularity of Chinese food everywhere in America?

lavishlatern 2006 days ago

> Besides, if "racism" is the explanation behind it, how are you going to explain the immense popularity of Chinese food everywhere in America?

Probably in the same way that one could explain how the existence of Taco Bell does not preclude racism towards Mexicans.

“Chinese food” is not analogous to Taco Bell. Panda Express might be your Taco Bell equivalent.. maybe.

Americanized Chinese food would probably make up most of what Americans are eating as Chinese food, so the Taco Bell comparison is apt.

American Chinese food is a lot sweeter, thicker, and more soy sauce based.

rangibaby 2006 days ago

You might be onto something with the name theory. In JP it’s commonly called “flavor salt”, and there is no sign of anti-MSG anywhere

The silly thing about this is that in Korea (as in Japan) seaweed/kelp based stock is incredibly common, and that's the historical origin of MSG as we know it today.

> In JP it’s commonly called “flavor salt”

In China, 味精, "essence of flavor".

rangibaby 2005 days ago

I think that’s because the original brand of MSG anywhere is Ajinomoto 味の素 which means essence of flavor. 味塩 is the same thing but comes mixed with salt.

jacobolus 2006 days ago

> instant ramen, which is basically an MSG+salt solution masquerading

Non-instant ramen is also essentially salt + oil + glutamate flavoring + noodles.

If you like you can take instant ramen and add a soft-boiled egg, some vegetables, and some fatty pork, or whatever other set of toppings you prefer.

In fact, if you want to eat ramen at home it’s the most practical (at least for the soup.) Actual ramen broth takes a lot of time to make from scratch.

rootusrootus 2006 days ago

I've heard that before, that many people like to buy Top Ramen (I think, IIRC it's considered better than Maruchan, but I may have it backwards) and then toss the noodles and keep the powdered soup pack. Much easier than the real thing, and respectably good given where it comes from.

Not sure what noodles to source, tho.

fingerlocks 2006 days ago

That term is over 50 years old and not commonly used, if at all, ever. The only time I've seen "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" brought up is either in a article about how that term is racist, or a historic piece referencing the origins from the 1968 New England Journal of Medicine.

However, my local Hippy Organic Community Grocery Store has all sorts of products proudly claiming the absence of MSG.

Auracle 2006 days ago

I’m pretty sure you hit the nail on the head with your last point. We all saw it when avoiding gluten became a fad. Very few people had the need to avoid gluten, but enough for it to be added to some packaging. That steamrolled in to people thinking that gluten was somehow bad for them, regardless of the fact that if they had celiac disease they would have known about it.

My friend and I had a competition to point out the most ridiculous gluten free indicated packaging. I won with sand.

There were certainly other factors in play (and in this case, nobody needs to avoid msg) but once you sees the thought in people’s mind that something should be avoided, they’ll come up with all sorts of reasons on their own.

smegger001 2006 days ago

>However, my local Hippy Organic Community Grocery Store has all sorts of products proudly claiming the absence of MSG.

I wonder if they label tomatoes with that? if so they are falsely advertising as it naturally occurs in tomato.

fingerlocks 2006 days ago

It usually says “No MSG added”

mdoms 2006 days ago

Maybe in America. Not "the West", certainly not in the part of the West I live in - I have never heard this very racist terminology.

xbmcuser 2006 days ago

MSG is bad is a myth that came out from the US years ago and spread world wide. I have seen no MSG signs in Thailand, Singapore, Pakistan and Malaysia. And when I asked the cooks why is MSG bad they did not have an answer just that everyone thinks so or that they are tourist hot spot and such signs get foreigners into the restaurant.

thereare5lights 2006 days ago

> Chinese Restaurant Syndrome

you'd think the name would give it away, but people are so quick to dismiss racism that this blaring red flag is just glossed over

mc32 2006 days ago

Ah but people didn’t make up that term. It was ‘popularized’ by the likes of the NYT. I’ve never heard a regular person refer to their perceived reaction to msg as Chinese restaurant syndrome. That comes from the press —the same ones now chastising people.

So stop calling MSG sensitivity "chinese restaurant syndrome" and disconnect the phenomenon from the racism. Does hysteria does not exist because it is a sexist word?

Yeah I never heard that term before reading these comments. I remember back in the late eighties the jokes about MSG were like (and about as lame as) the jokes about tryptophan in turkey. I don’t recall it ever being a critique of Chinese people, but of the Americanized Chinese junk food (e.g General Tzo’s chicken), very much so. The same way people criticize(d) chicken McNuggets. Nobody ever spoke down about expertly done Peking duck that I recall.

sonotmyname 2006 days ago

> Given that in the west it was also dubbed "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" I would think some form of prejudice played a part.

Given that 60 years ago the only place anyone in the US would run into manufactured MAG was in a Chinese restaurant, calling it that doesn’t seem the least bit related to race.

And given that I’ve grown up in Canada and the US, eat Chinese food regularly, and have never heard this term before today, it seems incredibly overblown.

microtherion 2005 days ago

In Switzerland, some of the people most concerned about MSG in their Chinese food grew up in households where pretty much the only seasoning used was Aromat. You would also find it next to the pepper and salt shakers in simpler restaurants for decades. Aromat is mostly MSG, and yet, no cases of "Swiss Restaurant Syndrome" are known in the medical literature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aromat

At least the Swiss own their MSG addiction and are listing Aromat as part of their "culinary heritage": https://www.patrimoineculinaire.ch/Produits#449

runawaybottle 2006 days ago

Bro, Asian on Asian racism is like way higher than western racism towards that region.

I’m almost positive Koreans think they are better than Chinese, and the Chinese think they are better than Koreans, and they both low key hate Japan’s uppityness (Of course the Japanese consider them ‘less than’, we can certainly throw in some historical advantage taking to add flame to this). This is like a age old tale in almost any region (think Pakistan/India/Bangladesh).

So ya, I can bet you there’s a level of passive aggressive racism to this day, like everywhere else on planet earth.

As Korean, yes there’s plenty of racism of Asians vs Asians. My aunts in Korea were terrified of Chinese people when they were kids because there were always rumors of them kidnapping kids etc.

There’s a lot of anger across Asia for Mainland Chinese these days. Practically all countries look down on Mainland Chinese, even those in Hong Kong does too. They think Mainland Chinese are dirty and loud and obnoxious because as tourists they are very obnoxious.

Koreans have general hate towards Japanese because of the war, but prefer Japanese to Chinese and all other Asians are looked down on, like Vietnamese, Philippines, etc.

wincy 2006 days ago

My (Chinese) stepmother told me to be careful about dating/marrying Korean girls because “they get a lot of plastic surgery and your kids will be ugly”.

Definitely some ingrained racism between all these different Asian ethnic groups.

> “they get a lot of plastic surgery and your kids will be ugly”

This practice has successfully crossed from Korea to China. :/

I agree that there are unfortunately too much hate among different East Asians, but it doesn't seem relevant here.

I mean, if you think Koreans' fear of MSG is somehow related to our prejudice against Chinese/Japanese cuisine, then clearly you haven't seen many Korean dishes.

stouset 2006 days ago

I think that just reinforces the point. If your culture eats tons of food that’s packed to the brim with glutamate but you’re vocal about the MSG in Chinese food… what should the takeaway be?

I guess I wasn't explicit enough, Koreans aren't vocal about MSG in Chinese food - we are vocal about MSG in our own food !!!

(But of course, only when it's added as factory-made "chemical" - if it's from dried anchovies and seaweed, that's natural, so of course that's totally OK, either in Korean, Chinese, or any other cuisine.)

What kind of (racist) actions are taken in the east due to this prejudice they have? And how does that compare (or how is it way higher) to how western racism is towards those minorities in the western countries? Thinking they are better doesn't really compare.

layoutIfNeeded 2006 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre

https://www.quora.com/If-youre-of-Chinese-ethnicity-and-livi...

https://asiatimes.com/2020/03/in-korea-double-standards-on-r...

https://archive.vn/bt6n1

You make it sound like racism only occurs in USA. This is naive. Racism is across the world and some are worse than others. Japanese took Korean women as literal sex slaves during their occupation and didn’t give them rightful citizenship in Japan and just looked down on them.

In China during the Rape of Nanking Japanese also did horrible atrocities, like cut open pregnant women and gamble on the sex of the fetus. Really horrible things but in America is only sounds like only white people commit racism, which is not true.

The most modern incidents of genocide happen in Asia. Cambodia in the 1970s and even Myanmar committing genocide in the last few years against Rohingya, lead by former Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi.

In Korea, many half-Korean Half-black children from American army were born and until recently they were openly spat on by Koreans in public. Until Hines Ward who is half Korean half Black won MVP for NFL Super Bowl, then it raised awareness in Korea over this.

So please don’t think racism is only in the US. What blacks experience today is much better than what they experience in other countries where there is true hate, not just stereotyping.

Absolutely not, in fact I didn't mention USA anywhere in my post. I was curious on what constitutes racism in the east vs. the west and I don't have experience in the east. I'm also not disregarding anywhere in between the countries of the east and west.

I know of the historical factors but that's like saying Germans are still racist because they have a history of being Nazis - I was more interested in what kind of experiences of racism between Asia are happening in modern times which I've seen you've written so thanks for that. I was also curious whether there were any parallels in one of the bigger issues like police brutality of minorities in Asia.

There is a whole other discussion when talking about true hate vs. stereotyping.

runawaybottle 2006 days ago

Sure, so the passive aggressive racism is a far cry from what would have been real manifestations of it that occurred in those regions historically. How does it manifest today? Maybe they hear a msg rumor and go ‘yeah, figures’. A better example might be that mainland Chinese people genuinely think Hong Kong people think they are ‘better than mainlanders’, and low key believe in and support the crackdown and integration of Hong Kong (put them in their place). Wild stuff, amongst your own you have this informed hatred.

Similar to Karens in America, we don’t have outright segregation, we have a diluted form of it, which of course is a far cry from what it was.

The water is not totally filtered yet, need a few more pass throughs (few more generations).

As to why I think it’s way higher, it’s simply because the West has strong shallow racism. But the East actually knows the nuances of their region and still find ways to be prejudiced. That just simply takes more bigotry imho, where as in the West they only need pure ignorance.

mancerayder 2006 days ago

The racism addition into everyday online discourse is what 'flavors' an article or topic, kind of like MSG flavors Doritos or stir-fry. Is it racism, is it not, it leads to a heated fight-or-flight type of feeling, or an indignation, or a strong nod and interest. Similar to the way salaciousness gets our attention in an ad or gossip story.

jnordonez 2006 days ago

I'll have my online discourse with an extra dash of racism accusations please, hold the logic.

mc32 2006 days ago

My parents used to have an msg shaker. I don’t even recall what they used it for.

The first time I heard something about avoiding MSG foods was from upper middle class fresh transplants from HK. Others of less means never mentioned it. So it’s news to me that someone would apply a blanket accusation as to where the myth comes from.

pzone 2006 days ago

Seasoning with salt, pepper and MSG is typical in Asian cooking.

bryanlarsen 2006 days ago

Parmesan cheese and Worcestershire sauce are used to add MSG to western dishes.

baby 2006 days ago

I’m half Chinese and my whole family think MSG is bad lol.

eplanit 2006 days ago

My wife and her family immigrated to the US from China -- they all believe that MSG is bad, too.

scruple 2006 days ago

Same here. Wife is first generation Chinese-American. All of the immigrant generation thinks MSG is bad. The family still in Hong Kong and Guangdong have said it, too. My mother-in-law believes MSG prevents her from getting to sleep easily at night. She can "always tell" when some restaurant uses MSG because of it. Lots of stories like that to be heard among this part of our family...

jonathanyc 2006 days ago

As a half-Korean, I can personally attest that Koreans are unfortunately (and kind of surreally) quite racist. Koreans also tend to hold quite naive views about racism encountered by Asian Americans.

I'm not taking a position on whether "MSG is bad" is purely due to racism, but I can't really buy "I'm Korean and I don't like MSG" as evidence against that claim.

https://twitter.com/kenjilopezalt/status/1291880511577546753

criley2 2006 days ago

Ironically, many asians know that over-consumption of MSG leads to the symptoms that are now "racist" to discuss.

Here's popular chef (and half-Japanese) J Kenji Lopez-Alt discussing how he experiences "MSG Symptom Complex" rarely, and that his Japanese grandmother was intimately familiar with the idea that msg overconsumption could those symptoms

https://twitter.com/kenjilopezalt/status/1291882403506475008

The racism angle totally takes over people's minds and this has quickly become a "taboo" subject where any questioning of the new order makes you a villainous racist, even though the science very clearly does not rule out msg causing these symptoms and concludes "more research is needed".

Is what it is, I'm pretty left-leaning in most ways, marched with BLM, and aggressively vote for racial equality: but I guess I'm a racist for not believing that this is settled science. And, as you mention, many east asians must also apparently be racist against themselves.

Koreans are generally racist against Chinese, especially Mainland Chinese.

tootie 2006 days ago

MSG comes from seaweed that Koreans eat with absolutely everything. They probably east more MSG than China.

Yap. My mom had a big bottle of MSG she used to make kimchi and on other foods. It wasn’t even thought of as bad.

loufe 2006 days ago

I mean I kind of get your point but just replace "racism" with "prejudice" and it doesn't hold water any longer.

stouset 2006 days ago

Yeah, especially when you consider that people will complain about MSG in Chinese food all day while, as mentioned, eating Doritos by the bagful.

Prejudice is probably a more accurate term than racism.

> Are we also being racist? (Against whom?)

I mean, it wouldn't be at all surprising for Koreans to be racist against Chinese, unless you take a specific American perspective in which Koreans and Chinese are the same thing.

yomly 2006 days ago

Exactly - it's definitely not racism. I do experience "chinese restaurant syndrome" (maybe the name is prejudiced???) when I get dim sum in the UK, US, Canada, sometimes Singapore but rarely in Hong Kong. Stuff like 豉汁蒸排骨 and 糯米鸡can be the worst. Generally, I dislike cantonese restaurant food outside of China/HK and that's really not racist given I have cantonese origins. I experience "Chinese restaurant syndrome" less when I consume "mainland" chinese food - like Sichuan, Hunan, Xinjiang, Shanxi food.

Who knows whether it's MSG - I definitely don't experience that lethargy eating Japanese food. But I'm also unconvinced that MSG and konbu/katsuo dashi are the same thing. The viewpoint "chemical x is chemical x in all its delivery mechanisms" is remarkably naive. The chemistry of digestion is really quite complex and the purified salt of something rather than in-aqua extraction to direct consumption REALLY is not the same thing. You ignore all kinds of subtle interactions that could be going on and is wholly unnuanced. Anyone who has spent any time in a chem/biochem lab knows all too well the strange and weird world of solvation and impurity and its effects on reactions, not to mention enzyme chemistry is insanely sensitive.

It's not the same but just compare smooth vs pulpy orange juice vs eating a raw orange. The nutrition profiles of that already are different even if you are par for #oranges consumed.

victor106 2006 days ago

This.

Invoking racism and gender discrimination when it’s not the reason, causes more racism and it gives more than ample opportunity to actual racists within us to exploit it for their own nefarious needs.

jeromegv 2006 days ago

There’s a long history of racism against Chinese immigrants in America. Among the only jobs they were allowed to have was having restaurants. Of course this led to rumours of Chinese restaurant being dirty and their MSG causing sickness. It’s a very long history and it’s well documented. While you’re at it, read on the Chinese exclusion act.

And now you’re saying that people who call this racism for what is is are the ones responsible for the racism. You’ve got to be kidding.

BurningFrog 2006 days ago

The Chinese Exclusion Act was 1882.

If that's the most recent example, I'd call it an "ancient history of racism", not a "long history of racism".

ceejayoz 2006 days ago

You probably should look at more than just the start date for that act.

> Exclusion was repealed by the Magnuson Act on December 17, 1943, which allowed 105 Chinese to enter per year. Chinese immigration later increased [to 2000/year from the "Asiatic barred zone"] with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which abolished direct racial barriers, and later by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the National Origins Formula.

BurningFrog 2006 days ago

Fair enough. That's still over half a century ago.

Everyone involved in setting these barriers are dead.

So does COVID-19 not exist because someone called it Chinese Flu? The phenomenon can exist despite the racist connotations.

MSG sensitivity has never been shown to be true in a replicable clinical environment in humans. The few studies that have shown this to cause symptoms use extremely large doses of MSG that aren't used in food (for one thing, the dosages involved would be unpalatable even for those without the symptoms; overseasoning is generally unpleasant)

  > MSG sensitivity has never been shown to be true in a replicable clinical environment in humans.

Actually, it has been. The fine article even mentions that.

  > The few studies that have shown this to cause symptoms use extremely large doses of MSG that aren't used in food (for one thing, the dosages involved would be unpalatable even for those without the symptoms;

So you do accept that some studies have demonstrated MSG sensitivity? So why the lie in the previous sentence? I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, but I just don't see how you claim the former statement given this statement.

In any case, yes, you are correct here. As per the fine article, the dose at which symptoms become common is six times the normal dose. Do you find it utterly impossible that some people could be sensitive at one-sixth the dose that "most people" become sensitive at?

I've heard this repeated so many times but I don't actually understand what that means - can you elaborate? Mentioning racism causes more racism? Doesn't that make sense?

Sort of sounds like the same thing as "the more you test for COVID the more cases there will be"

I've read your sentence like 10 times and it makes no sense to me. How would one exploit someone calling out (false by your definition) racism to cause more racism?

I think the actual argument should be that if one cries wolf so many times it is hard to take it seriously when there really is a wolf.

Hence people don't take it seriously... Racism fatigue.

Kinda like quarantine fatigue when particular mitigations don't make scientific sense.

Edit: take my own advice and change "you" to "one."

throwaway2245 2006 days ago

It's like crying wolf, except: there is indeed a wolf and you just don't care about the sheep.

A reminder of the HN guidelines and I'll assume in good faith you didn't mean me by "you."

--------

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

runawaybottle 2006 days ago

I’ve made this point before, it’s similar to dry snitching, ‘I’m happy to hear you finally stopped beating your wife’. Uh? I never did, but Jesus way to throw something over my head that I now have to clean.

Will this cause more racism? Inadvertently, yes. Racism occurs due to bigotry and ignorance, one which needs to be systematically exposed and the other requiring remedial education (what you think you know is not right). If the problem requires intellectual engagement and discussion, and the intellectual battlefield is a Vietnam helicopter drop off where your average time of survival is 7 minutes before you die, lots of people will be dodging that draft.

So the war never gets fought.

pmoriarty 2006 days ago

"Invoking racism and gender discrimination when it’s not the reason, causes more racism"

So, wait, you're saying if someone who's not a racist gets called a racist that's going to be enough to turn him in to a racist?

If that's all it took they were probably racist to begin with.

KMag 2006 days ago

I think they're referring to a more long-term and less direct causality when they say crying wolf causes more racism. In my reading of the GP, "leads to" would be a better word choice.

> enough to turn him in to a racist

If I were to call you a sexist for your choice of pronouns (and throw in "self hate is the worst kind" if your pronouns happen to be he/him), and you were to see several other likely unwarranted accusations being thrown around against you and others, you'd be less likely to take notice when real sexism is called out. Fewer people taking notice of real actionable cases of sexism would likely result in more sexism over time.

throwaway201103 2006 days ago

All humans are racist to one degree or another.

pmoriarty 2006 days ago

That racism is "natural" and that "everyone's racist" are common (false) claims among racists, who try to use them as excuses for their own racism.

rectang 2006 days ago

I'd consider myself very socially liberal, but I accept that at least everyone experiences prejudiced thoughts and impulses.

From that premise we can proceed to the idea that "racists" act on those impulses, while people who are "not racist" resist them. However, these impulses can be extremely subtle, and no matter how we struggle, I don't believe that that any human being lives a life avoiding racist acts entirely.

Would you still argue that I'm a racist perpetuating a false claim as an excuse for my own racism? I mean, I accept that I'm prejudiced and every once in a while racist despite my best efforts, so that part is true in a sense. I'm don't think I'm trying to excuse myself, though.

tpush 2006 days ago

Please leave this "race realism" shit off HN, thanks.

starfallg 2006 days ago

1. MSG (and its link to the taste of unami) was discovered by a Japanese chemist.

2. East Asian can also be racist against other East Asians.

Not saying that discrimination against MSG is racist, but your argument falls way short.

darkerside 2006 days ago

Bro don't pretend Koreans never act racist towards Chinese!

franklampard 2006 days ago

Different groups of people can hold the same point of view due to different reasons.

Koreans hold it for non-racist reasons do not prove the rest hold it for the same reasons

vkou 2006 days ago

I wish more people understood that racism isn't just the cartoon boogieman of a redneck living in a trailer park who hates and fears _ethnic group_.

aaron695 2006 days ago

I think your mistake is to think being racist is bad. We are all racist. It's part of being human, we form groups, it's how we invent vaccines and go to the moon.

I see MSG as Japanese, since the purified process was invented there. I have no idea if Koreans in general consider it a Japanese invention?

Equally it could be the power of Hollywood. It changes culture.

But it's not "being misinformed". It's well know MSG is ok. MSG can also replace fat and sugar for taste, I'd consider this a worse public health issue than the anti-vaccine movement (outside of pandemics) for instance.

wpietri 2006 days ago

Humans are also naturally violent, but me saying "Hey, I'm going to stab you because I'm just human" is probably not something you'd shrug off.

In particular, what you're indulging here is the naturalistic fallacy, or the is/ought fallacy. What's natural tells us nothing about what's good. Tooth decay is natural and your toothbrush is artificial. But I'd bet you're not going to stop brushing your teeth just to stay philosophically consistent.

mechnesium 2006 days ago

Yeah, but you can’t put an end to violence, and violence serves an incredible biological purpose. Racism will never cease to exist, nor should society try to force it away, since that will only make things worse. Perhaps racism even serves some meritable biological purpose.

Come to think of it, racism is like a social heuristic. Antivirus software uses heuristic analysis to quickly group certain classes of malware based on code similarity. In the same vein, humans do it to categorize people, based on slightly fuzzier logic.

So what if you can't put an end to violence or racism? In both cases, we can work to minimize them. We can and should.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death

markdown 2006 days ago

I wonder what proportion of Koreans who believe that MSG is bad also believe that fan death is real.

phkahler 2006 days ago

Yeah. There are some foods that give me terrible migraine headaches, but not always. It seems to require eating a lot. I'm not certain but I think the culprit is MSG. Now people want to say I'm racist for thinking that? WTF?

thereare5lights 2006 days ago

lmao, the history of racism behind the demonization of msg is well documented

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-msg-got-a-bad-rap-f...

And funny enough there's another comment saying

> If the only food they know to contain MSG is Chinese food then it’s a stretch to call that racism.

and that's exactly where this hoax started

after all, it doesn't take a genius to connect the dots when the vernacular for msg problems is "chinese restaurant syndrome"

So stop calling MSG sensitivity "chinese restaurant syndrome". Do you suppose that hysteria does not exist because it is a sexist term?

Hysteria is no longer a valid mental diagnosis according to the APA, so yes.

newen 2006 days ago

And they removed it as a valid mental diagnosis because it has sexist connotations? I doubt it though considering current political climate, I wouldn’t be surprised. His point still stands, however.

bobthepanda 2005 days ago

It was removed as a mental diagnosis because it only applied to women and basically functioned as a catch-all for "we don't understand why women are freaking out." It was overly broad as to be unhelpful.

The diagnoses that have succeeded it do not only apply to women, and they also have more specific requirements.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness

Now it's "Mass psychogenic illness"

Thorentis 2006 days ago

Yep, from the article:

"... a disturbing undercurrent of racism that seemed to blame the unsavoriness of Chinese food"

You can't be racist towards food. Chinese people aren't the only people capable of cooking food originally consumed and prepared in China. If you don't like Chinese food and find it unsavoury, no normal person would think you're a racist. This whole "red under the bed" approach to racism is getting out of hand.

kevin_thibedeau 2006 days ago

Do you ever use the phrase "long time no see"? It is treated as innocuous today but it is rooted in a mocking jest at broken English spoken by Chinese immigrants. The funny part is that I know Asian Americans who say it without knowing where it came from. You can be misinformed about something that is fundamentally racist.

The twisted MSG belief system is just a less overtly racist version of "Chinese restaurants serve cat and dog". i.e. This ethnic food is not trustworthy and worthy of derision, as are the people by extension.

> The funny part is that I know Asian Americans who say it without knowing where it came from.

I know many Asian Chinese; they tend to really like saying "long time no see" because they find the saying so intuitive.

I mean, long time no see is a word for word translation for a Chinese greeting (in Cantonese, hou noi mou gin)

In Mandarin, 好久不见 háo jiǔ bú jiàn. It's not really word-for-word; the Mandarin version breaks down as very-longtime-no-see.

smsm42 2006 days ago

I hate how everything is now "racism". Any mistake people make must be "racism". When you have only a hammer everything looks like a nail.

A lot of people believe in myriads of myths about food. MSG is one of the strongest ones, which I've heard about from people living in Americas, Europe, Asia, Australia... and probably is popular in Africa too, my sample there is not great. But in the US people are now obsessed with finding "racism" so that must be it.

There's also a lot of people who claim gluten allergy without actually having one. Are those racist too? Or maybe we could stop reducing the infinite variety of human behavior - and infinite capacity of humans to delude themselves and others - to one specific reason that is in fashion in the US this season?

There are also many non-celiacs who would swear that they cannot eat glutten. That does not discredit the actual existence of celiacs.

When I was younger, I would sometimes discover that certain foods contain MSG by identifying what I had eaten before the onset of symptoms. Now I've learned to check everything beforehand. And the one time that the mother-in-law used her neighbour's soup mix instead of the soup mix that I bought her, I was able to know by the symptoms. Now my teenagers avoid MSG, but not because they are sensitive. The older of them is a vegetarian, but not because she lacks incisors or canines.

ubercow13 2006 days ago

But coeliacs disease is a real thing, whereas there is no evidence that MSG sensitivity is, so they are not comparable.

Of course there is evidence, that is why we are having this discussion. In addition to the evidence that there exists a very small minority of people who are sensitive to MSG, there exists a large industry that is dependent upon the availability of an inexpensive, effective flavour enhancer. That industry has an interest in discrediting the ill effects of MSG, just as the petrochemical industry had an interest in discrediting the effects of CO2 in the atmosphere and the tobacco industry had an interest in discrediting the effects of smoking.

ubercow13 2005 days ago

I must be mistaken because based on the article, I thought we were having this discussion because there is no evidence.

The article mentions right in the beginning that studies have shown evidence for a connection between MSG intake and onset of symptoms.

turtlebits 2006 days ago

MSG occurs naturally in a lot of foods and won't necessarily show up in ingredient lists. It's in tomatoes, soy sauce, seaweed, etc.

cpncrunch 2006 days ago

I think it's just a desire to blame something else (wifi, 5g, etc) for health problems, rather than taking responsibility for changing their crappy diet or stressful life.

drzaiusapelord 2006 days ago

Yep! I remember being taught it was something "shifty" Chinese people do to their food to make it taste better as a sort of dishonest competitive trick, at the cost of the health of their customers. I was told so many ethnic groups were "shifty" like this compared to the "moral" white majority. I think growing up in the USA means being exposed to a lot of different kinds of racisms and "otherings." Its incredible how in denial some people are over this and how "racism is dead, if it ever existed" is a common theme in the USA, especially over the last 4 years due to presidential politics.

It’s not a “USA” thing. Different groups of people are skeptical of other groups of people, all over the world. The US is just unusual in having enormous amounts of people from different groups interacting with each other.

The UK, for example, isn’t just 90% white. It’s 80% white British. Same thing for Germany and France. They’re borderline ethnostates. The US isn’t more than 15% of any ethnic group (with German Americans being the largest group).

krakatau1 2006 days ago

Just go back 50 years, they were 95% single ethnic states with remaining 5% european minorities.

  > The UK, for example, isn’t just 90% white. It’s 80% white British.

Is that still the case? My then-13 year old daughter visited London two years ago, when she returned I asked her if the British are as polite as they are rumored to be. Her answer was that there are no British in London, it's a city of all immigrants and tourists.

eigenket 2006 days ago

London is a massive outlier in basically every way compared to the rest of the UK, but London is still like 45% white British (according to the wiki page).

In 2011 roughly 35% of the population of London was born outside the UK. In terms of population the biggest groups are from India, Poland, the Republic of Ireland, Bangladesh and Nigeria (in that order).

Our last census was 2011 so the data is pretty close to as out of date as it could possibly be. We'll have another in 2021 (I say we although I'll be out of the country for that one).

Interesting, thank you!

drzaiusapelord 2006 days ago

Well, its 'total' 60% white (20% more white than NYC), which is pretty white, nor is that whiteness distributed evenly. I was just in Chelsea, which is pretty pricey, and it was near exclusively white outside of people who worked in the service industry. Depending where in London she went and what she did, she ran into different groups of people, much like if you went to Chicago and stayed exclusively on either its south or north sides.

More than likely, as a tourist, she saw mostly other tourists and the largely immigrant dominated low-paying service industry jobs. I was also recently in Iceland and while in pure 'tourist mode' saw few native Icelanders due to so few working in the tourist and service industry. When we ventured out to the neighborhood store areas, boutique shops, non-tourist bars, higher-end restaurants, etc it was almost 100% white.

>tourists.

You may want to remind her that when she's in traffic, she's also traffic. Of course its full of tourists, she's there isn't she? Its beautiful and historic and should be full of tourists - the same way Athens, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, etc are full of tourists. This is a feature, not a bug.

Thank you for that wonderful insight. As you mention, in London she was in tourist mode, doing things and being places where tourists are. That is a good lesson to point out, selection, when examining any survey.

London is one of the most cosmopolitan cities in world. I walked down the main streets, not even the white people were speaking English! I’m sure many turists but still It’s a great city!

I also went to Birmingham and it’s much different. I talked to taxi cab driver and he said he ever left his city even though it’s very small. So maybe less mixing in smaller places in UK.

Good to know. She is extremely observant, so I'm glad to see this confirmation.

Alex3917 2006 days ago

> I remember being taught it was something "shifty" Chinese people do to their food to make it taste better as a sort of dishonest competitive trick, at the cost of the health of their customers.

Yeah the MSG thing is clearly racism. But to be fair pretty much every Chinese takeout places uses white rice by default and charges an extra dollar for brown rice, which makes the food taste better at the cost of the health of their customers.

in_cahoots 2006 days ago

Outside of Thai, I think most restaurants charge more for brown rice.

I hesitate to add this because it's anecdotal, but I have had more than one person tell me of restaurants that say no MSG on the front window, but when passing behind the restaurant, noting empty cartons of MSG.

The prejudice comes in when people then assume all Chinese restaurants are therefore dishonest, discounting that restaurants everywhere are capable of being a bit dishonest ... Kangaroo meat in burgers, selling pork as veal... Frozen food sold as fresh. Just watch a Gordon Ramsey show.

CivBase 2006 days ago

I was following until the racism question. People misattribute sources of illness and subsequent recovery all the time. There are still people out there who believe wifi gives them headaches. Why should racism have anything to do with it?

Droobfest 2006 days ago

I still think it's wrong to dismiss people's experiences out of hand and lump it all onto the racism pile.

So it's likely not the MSG, but maybe the chinese restaurants these people go to have a reputation for not being the freshest? This can raise histamine levels in the food and cause the same symptoms as an allergic reaction (which it basically is).

Whatever it is, there is no reason to assume the food intolerance itself is a lie..

tptacek 2006 days ago

On the one hand, you think it's wrong to suggest there's racism involved in MSG's reputation tying back to "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome", and on the other hand, you offer an axiomatic derivation of Chinese restaurants being unhealthy ("histamines") because of their "reputation for not being the freshest".

To be fair, the poster said "the Chinese restaurants they go to..." Not necessarily all.

But it's a weak argument...

I wonder how much is from blood sugar spikes from white rice and everyone's favorite Americanized sugar glazed Chinese dishes combined with the MSG nocebo effect.

CivBase 2006 days ago

Where I'm from, Asian cuisine is not very popular with older generations - probably because they didn't grow up with it. It has only recently garnered enough popularity to establish successful chains (aside from highly Americanized options like Panda Express, PF Changs, or HuHot).

Small, independent, "Ma & Pa" type restaurants vary much more in quality than established chains. When your only options for Asian food are those kinds of restaurants - and a limited selection at that - it's not surprising for bad quality to sometimes be associated with the cuisine.

I still have to drive far out of my way to find good Indian food, despite living in a metropolitan area. Which is a shame, because I really enjoy it.

asiachick 2006 days ago

I've always attributed it to the scary chemical sounding name "Monosodium Glutamate"

There's that common joke "Di-hydrogenoxide, a little will kill you can and it's in nearly everything. Babies die from it. Why isn't the government doing something about it!" etc and it's always generally easy to convince some people because of the scary sounding name.

No racism required

tootie 2006 days ago

My white mom became convinced she had MSG sensitivity at some point, but she loved chinese food so much she ate it anyway.

https://biomedgrid.com/fulltext/volume5/fried-rice-syndrome-....

mgh2 2006 days ago

Maybe people who suffered got confused with the "Fried Rice Syndrome"?

moron4hire 2006 days ago

Glutamate is also developed during low-and-slow cooking that causes the breakdown of connective tissues in meat. I had a roommate that swore up and down that he had an MSG allergy, but also ate the shit out of the smoked BBQ our other roommate and I made all the time. He was also kind of a pothead, so there were lots of Doritos in the house, too.

to11mtm 2006 days ago

> to come and share their stories of MSG-related symptoms after eating at Chinese restaurants.

I've wondered this myself over the years. My current operating theory is that it's not necessarily the MSG but perhaps the Mushroom powder...

kevinmchugh 2006 days ago

It might be the taste of MSG-rich food, when a sensitive individual hasn't eaten recently, that triggers it. This could explain why it's so commonly reported with miso soup - it's served at the beginning of the meal. The association is known by folks who grew up eating MSG natively: https://twitter.com/kenjilopezalt/status/1291882403506475008...

If this were true, it'd explain why other glutamate-rich foods don't have the same reputation. It might suggest that we shouldn't buy doritos from a vending machine when we need a snack, though.

Studies where respondents can't taste the MSG don't show an effect, so maybe it's the taste, and not the chemical, that causes the problem. Also it seems unlikely that the MSG could actually get to the brain.

I'd love to see an experiment where self-identifying sensitive individuals either eat miso soup or gargle it without swallowing and see if there's a difference in reactions.

I'd also like to know more about common knowledge about MSG in Japan and China.

(I think the racist myth could cause a psychosomatic effect for people who aren't sensitive)

chaganated 2006 days ago

I'd like to know what the dosages were before telling people that it's "all in their heads," then labeling them as racists.

mgraczyk 2006 days ago

Hmm from my experience this belief is more common amongst Asian Americans than White Americans. Hard to believe that's caused by racism.

bassman9000 2006 days ago

How does umami and Chinese get mixed?

Looks to me we just wanted to find racism whatever the cost was.

asphaltycode 2006 days ago

If the only food they know to contain MSG is Chinese food then it’s a stretch to call that racism.

brayhite 2006 days ago

I think you’re assuming the Dave guy accused those folks of being racist. That’s not the same as suggesting historic racism demonizing MSG is what led to them internalizing some feeling of “MSG allergy”, which is what Dave IS suggesting.

  > Dave proposes, “do you think racism plays a part?”

So does COVID-19 not exist, because somebody called it Chinese Flu? A thing can exist, independent of racism, even if somebody uses it to promote their racism.

wyattpeak 2006 days ago

Sure, but the evidence he's putting forward suggests that it doesn't exist, or at least isn't widely present among people who claim to suffer the condition.

Correct, because he is portraying one side of a story. I could point you to studies that show no connection between smoking and lung cancer. That doesn't mean that other studies, with different conclusions, do not exist.

wyattpeak 2006 days ago

Right, but that's not my point. You seem to suggest that his argument is that MSG allergy doesn't exist because some people's belief in it is racist ("does COVID-19 not exist, because somebody called it Chinese Flu?").

That's not his argument. He argues that it doesn't exist based on the fact that people who claim to be allergic don't suffer ill effects from other MSG-containing products. The comment about racism is secondary, it's not the basis of his claim that the allergy isn't real.

  > He argues that it doesn't exist based on the fact
  > that people who claim to be allergic don't suffer
  > ill effects from other MSG-containing products.

Some people who claim to be allergic don't suffer ill effects, and some do. This effect is very well known for other fad allergies, such as gluten intolerance. The existence of "gluten intolerant" people who eat cookies does not preclude the existence of celiacs.

jariel 2006 days ago

So if it was 'Polish' food and the same phenom existed, would we say 'racism'?

No, but probably some mild bits of cultural stereotypes, and frankly - there are good ones and bad ones.

As an example of 'positive' cultural stereotypes and possibly racism is 'Traditional Chinese Medicine' - the majority of the practice (all of it?) has zero scientific foundation and is essentially a sham, yet zillions of Westerners pay zillions of dollars for all sort of 'Ancient Chinese Knowledge' which is just quackery.

Finally, if there were a significant campaign to demonize 'Doritos' as 'plastic food' much in the same way some people feel about margarine, or hydrogenated fats ... and if we felt 'Chinese food' were 'always natural' then the opposite prejudices might occur.

The technical argument for 'racism' could be made but it would just be needlessly aggravating.

axiolite 2006 days ago

Or maybe they have a bad reaction to a different ingredient common in Chinese restaurant food, and simply mis-identified it as an MSG allergy? And why exclude Asians who believe they have an MSG allergy? They should have an equal opportunity to be told they are racist, even if against their own ethnicity...

Why do so many people allow political correctness make them insane? Is it racist against Italians any time someone says eating pizza made them feel sick? Chinese food is just as Americanized as pizza, anyhow.