Chinese food to blame?

[DonJuane]

In today's world everyone seems a target to be made fun of and certainly no one is making fun of you here, Doyle but traditionally people who suffer from "Chinese Food Syndrome" historically serve as targets for a lot of ridicule. In fact one of my most admired "foodies" and the best TV producer I've known, the late, great Anthony Bourdain was an absolute ass in his writings and carrying's on regarding the suffering of people from this syndrome. I even admit in the past I cast a few laughs toward people who I thought were a little mentally tipsy and must be dwelling too much on the imagination side of life. But all that changed for me around 8 years ago.

You see personally I have lived and loved MSG all my life. We as kids started off with Adolph's meat tenderizer and butchering our own meet on the farm, it needed all the help it could get being as tough as it was. So I am someone who has loaded every piece of meat that has gone on the grill with a MSG derivative of some sorts in the past and in earlier days I even put it in salads on occasion with no ill effects. I have also added derivatives of it to my multi-spiced double throw-down Bloody Mary Mix and just about every dish you can think of some time in the past. I even have a bad habit of after I season my steaks, shaking a little pile on the top of my left hand and licking it off. It just tastes so good to me I can't resist or explain it. So you might really be confused when in my "past life" (time spent in US suburbia in the normal 9-8 corporate job) that I developed an addiction to Pho (Vietnamese beef noodle soup) and experienced what I did.

I was happily eating the "large bowl" at my favorite local Pho shop and then one day after eating there for over two years, I walked out to the car and it hit me. It had never happened before then but like you say, a very tight band developed across my chest, my breathing was impaired and I though I was having a heart attack. I pulled over and was stunned to the point I nearly dialed an ambulance but yet I just held on to the wheel there, waiting for the pain to hopefully subside before I went full 911. After 15 minutes (in my case) the pain began to slowly subside. Still I kept eating the Pho and kept having the exact same scenario occur and yet I couldn't mentally tie the two together for several weeks or maybe it was I just didn't want to accept the reality. I always took me about the same amount of time to finish my soup and I began always having the pain and having to stop the car exactly 15 minutes after I left the restaurant and I was usually a bit down the road before it hit me. For quite a while I still didn't put 2 and 2 together until I decided to try another restaurant other than my favorite one but it was coincidentally owned by the same owner I found after some research and in fact created the same scenario when I tried it as well. After several calls I finally got in touch with the restaurant owner and explained how I had been eating at his restaurant for a couple of years and that something he must have changed recently was making me have these attacks. He laughed at me and then I asked if he would at least be courteous enough to check and let me know if he had changed distributors recently for his Pho ingredients. He nicely said he would check but the next phone call I made to him he gave me the name of his lawyer and closing with "quit your complaining and just go eat somewhere else if you don't like it (aha, another native Texan I thought).

So I did some further research on it and reached the same conclusion. No one had ever established a clear connection to MSG and heart pain and difficulty breathing in any study and basically if you reported such an issue you were portrayed to be some sort of a quack. So with no where to go, I dropped it and that's even after searching out and phoning some organizations who had claimed to have once done a study on the topic in the past.

Missing my Pho, I did more research on Trip Advisor and found a very popular restaurant claiming to use traditional recipes and I phoned and explained to the owner what had happened to me in the past and she said yes she had indeed heard of that before and I should understand that the reason she was in the top 5 Vietnamese restaurants was that they used used fresh and proper ingredients and no MSG at all. So I drove the 24 miles across town to get away from the locally unscrupulous area restaurant owner and stuck my neck out to try again. And boy did I enjoy the Pho! It was truly the best I had ever had. After finishing it I walked back out to the car and waited but nothing happened, nothing at all except the comfortable feeling I had just enjoyed a real treat in the world of true artisan cooks and restaurant owners. So the good news is there is at least one restaurant that is sticking with the old tradition of flavor, freshness and labor in contrast to those plagued with so much greed they are willing to pawn off any newer and cheaper chemical concoction that comes on the market which allows them to skip out on quality, toss in a couple of teaspoon fulls of "who knows what" and rake in another windfall.

So I don't know what the real story is, if pure MSG got too expensive and the Chinese have come up with a cheaper chemical substitute they are pawning off on greedy restaurants or if I simply got older or what the hell the issue is. And today while I still pile my steaks and sometimes salads with MSG name bearing ingredients or have frequently in the past, I have never, never had a reaction like that after walking away from those local restaurants. So I agree with what has already been suggested, walk away and never look back. Unfortunately we don't always have alternatives here. So from that perspective I feel your pain and not only the one of now doing without, but one who has had the experience to know exactly what you are talking about.

Still one thing remains however, and that is this issue is a very serious one to people who are affected by it. And I can't say it is MSG itself, because I still eat my fair share of MSG with absolutely no reaction at all. Yet certainly and without doubt it is something being sold within the Asian food industry that is severely dangerous to a section of the world's population and something I hope someday gets investigated. Little probability of that in today's corporate themed world.