The invisible flavour of the east

Is MSG a recipe for disaster or just a harmless flavouring? Yorkie Pittstop steps up to the plate and wonders, would the dish taste just as sweet without

MSG is an acronym that strikes fear into the hearts of a few westerners I know. In fact for a couple of them, khong mi chinh (no MSG in the local lingo) is one of the few phrases they know.

Vietnamese on the other hand seem to pretty much accept it. I’ve even met one Vietnamese national abroad who even travelled with a packet to add to soups, which I admit sounds a bit excessive, I mean I’d never, as much as I love it, travel, with sachets of Dijon mustard in my inside pocket, just in case someone served me a sandwich without.

An English friend just can’t digest MSG, if digest is the right word. Once we went to eat pho (Noodle soup), and as we ordered he leaned over and barked “Pho! Khong mi chinh!” Just to emphasise the importance of this instruction he made several severe slashing motions with his hand, just to enforce the message, “if served MSG this could very well be my last supper.”

But perhaps they thought the dramatic motions meant serve more. Or perhaps they were curious to see what would happen, as halfway through his soup he started to sweat and fidget. He said he felt dizzy, abandoned his soup and staggered next door to a poky little café.

By the time I finished my soup and entered the café he was yawning violently and continuously, though I did arrive in time to catch his epitaph – “bloody MSG”.

Then he nodded off like a bored philistine at an excruciating theatrical performance, slumped against the wall, snoring faintly. He might as well have chucked the coffee over his shoulder.

Plenty of other people have told me of “turns” after a “dose” of MSG. But are they just an unfortunate minority?
You may not be allergic but it may be causing you damage, say the detractors. Some of the anti-MSG propaganda I’ve read goes so far as to claim, basically, it rots your brain, causes asthma, leads to obesity, and perhaps most simply and importantly, is totally unnecessary in food preparation.

MSG has long been the scourge of sensitive consumers as strong doses are used to flavour bland food or make cheap tortilla chips dangerously addictive.

But the Japanese man who discovered this funny little food addictive wasn’t out to destroy your taste buds. He just wanted to see what made food taste so good.

His name was Dr Kikunae Ikeda and in his native Japan a seaweed, called Konbu, was used to enhance the taste of foods.

In the early 1900s, the doctor isolated the taste enhancing property in seaweed – glutamic acid. Dr Ikeda and his colleague Dr Saburosuke Suzuki then founded the company Ajinomoto (Japanese for “Essence of Taste”), which began to manufacture monosodium glutamate (the original MSG).

At the end of WWII, US soldiers sampled rations taken from Japanese POWs and claimed the foreign rations tasted better than their own. This got MSG into the American market as food producers discovered it – and Ajinomoto itself set up a US subsidiary.

But the base substance itself isn’t MSG. Dr Kikunae Ikeda, christened it “umami” which means something pretty close to “yummy” in Japanese. Umami is now described as the Fifth taste – the other four musketeers being sweet, salty, sour and bitter.

Umami can be found naturally in everything from Parmesan cheese and fish sauce to broccoli and tomatoes. What happens, to simplify, is the human tongue tastes the released glutamate in all of these foods – likewise in MSG – and sends messages of joy and happiness to the brain. Hence, a tasty dish.

Of course, too much it seems may very well be a bad thing. Who knows? What has become apparent (I realised as I sat sipping my bitter, sweet coffee, watching my slumbering friend) is the fact there is a reason to carry your own MSG in your inside pocket – to serve yourself.

It’s the only way to know how much you’re getting.

I know queue!

The queue is a fairly unfamiliar and untidy concept in Vietnam but standing at the back Teddy de Burca Jnr. is ready to get stuck in, boots and all

At Hanoi train station I stand three people back from the counter, waiting in turn like everyone else, to be served in due course. But others drift in and merge into the sides of the queue ahead of me – like molecules of mercury rolling onto a greater mass – and suddenly I’m playing back row in a scrum for tickets to Danang.

Now, these sneaky rascals may believe the foreign man is too polite or insignificant to be worth considering but in my younger, more athletic days, I played a bit of rugby and learnt how to ruck and maul with the big boys.

So, I gently lean in on the two tallish Vietnamese boys ahead – let’s just call them my lock forwards – and scythe into the middle of the pack, before rolling off on the inside of the flanker, a slightly plucky but tigerish middle-aged woman.

Her little elbows dig into my stomach, and if either of the two boys are pickpockets I’ll be taken to the cleaners but, at least, now I’m within a stretch of the ticket salesperson – a woman who at first glance appears to have missed the joys of spring since life began on earth.

Now, I must use the power of “Oi” – invented by someone at the back of the queue, I hazard to guess. Perhaps, I even have an advantage speaking the local lingo with my comical lilt.

And sure enough, her little ears prick up at my mangled pronunciation of “Chi oi, toi den day truoc ma!” (I came here first!). For a moment, the pack stops squirming; she looks up at my flushed hopeful head, suddenly grins and announces, with an air of triumph – “Mr Bean.”

Not someone I aspire to emulate, but ne’ertheless, at least, now, I have her attention. “Yes, I’m Mr Bean, and I’d like a ticket to Danang.”

“Mr Bean is going to Danang,” she shouts out to anyone who’ll listen. Then we scoot through a rapid series of questions concerning both my personal life and ticket specifications. Everyone around listens in, as though we were all now having an impromptu press conference.

The conclusion – Mr Bean is not married, he wants a soft sleeper, he has no children, he wants to return in a week, his clothes are quite ugly and he would prefer a lower bunk bed. We would also recommend he select a local wife.

After all that, with my personal life and ticket details made public, the total comes to VND495,000. There is a slight drawing of breath behind my ear as I withdraw my wallet, a shiver of anticipation and more than a smidgen of wonder – just how fat is his wallet going to be?

The answer is not very, I realise, with the panache of Mr Bean himself, I’ve left my cash at home. I blurt this out and swivel, and slip back through the queue-slash-scrum – now well over a dozen people are heaving onto the counter – to avoid being ridiculed. But there’s no escaping that easy.
“Mr Bean forgot his wallet,” roars the ticket woman, much to everyone’s amusement.

I look back over my shoulder. Everyone is laughing and pointing at me (affectionately). I suppose, I can console myself that it could very well be the happiest queue in the country at this very moment in time, who knows, maybe even the world.

I also notice, slipping out the door that the plucky little woman has slipped to the front while no one is concentrating. No doubt about it – with that competitive spirit she’d make a fine wee flanker on the rugby pitch.

A symphony for the devil

Teddy de Burca Jnr. says that the music isn’t in the air, in fact, it’s trapped in a mobile phone

I sit in the café beside a young couple – a lovely, smartly dressed and well educated looking couple. Both smile shyly and look down, averting eye contact. She giggles, he chortles.

You might guess it’s a little bit of harmless flirtation – but neither of them is making a joke, why, they aren’t even talking to each other.

No, as I sip my coffee, the wilful young lovers are doing something far more entertaining than confabulating in seductive tones over the low tables. What would be the fun in that when you can, instead, be trying every single ringtone in your brand new phone?

Of course, when they finish, to try and get back to the one they liked they have to go through the whole lot again. Desperately trying to find that catchy little Beethoven number, perhaps.

In the end the girl settles for the standard Nokia ringtone – apparently now the most frequently heard melody in the world – and the boy chooses, without irony I suspect, one of Britney’s finest, Hit me baby, one more time.

I know I’m not alone when I complain as there is a man in my office who twitches like a shell-shocked war veteran every time a phone rings.

And the rings are never easy to ignore: Jingle Bells throughout the year, the Mission Impossible theme tune, always chosen in every office around the world by the guy with the biggest bunch of keys. (I myself flirted with the idea of downloading the Darth Vadar score for my phone. Just for gentle intimidation.)

But it doesn’t matter what jingle or melody it is. Ringtones are designed to attract your attention, so if it’s not your phone ringing it’s like your little nephew prodding you repeatedly when you’re trying to read a book. Especially when the person ringing never gives up and the person who owns the phone is AWOL. The phone just sits on their neglected desk ringing away. And just as my beleaguered colleague starts frothing at the mouth, the phone stops. Then, after a very brief respite it starts again.

One day he’ll crack, it’s only a matter of time. I picture him as one half of the classic Dilbert cartoon, which had two office colleagues standing by a desk with one saying to the other, “Your cellphone? Was it small, white and... flushable?”

And spare a thought for the musicians belittled by the whole concept. Francisco Tarrega, the 19th-century Spanish musician, known as the father of the modern classical guitar. Tarrega’s life was a miserable one. He suffered from ophthalmia, a horrendous form of conjunctivitis, and was said to have contracted it as a child when he was nearly drowned in a poisoned river by a mentally-disturbed nursemaid.

Now, even in the grave the misery continues for Tarrega as his masterpiece Gran Vals is now the 13-note jingle that is universally known as simply “that really annoying Nokia ringtone”.

Other alarming facts - The bells are ringing out

* Money - One of Hip Hop’s top producers, Scott Storch, who’s written huge singles for the likes of Beyonce, 50 Cent, Mariah Carey and many more, now devotes his time to the much more worthwhile (financially speaking) pursuit of composing ringtones and why wouldn’t he, after the people behind The Crazy Frog earned an estimated £14 million from that particular ringtone – the most commercially successful of all time. Ringtones are estimated to be a $9.4-billion-business in the year 2008.

* Faith - Mobile phones and ringtones can be used in a more spiritual manner, or so says Thai monk Phra Phayom Kalayano of the Glass Garden Temple who after hearing sexually explicit sounds coming from teenagers’ phones, decided to develop a set of more wholesome ringtones. These “dharma doctrine” tones, as they are known, consist of several pithy sayings designed to set listeners back on the righteous path. Pick of the litter? “Don’t let mobile phone conversations lead to premature sex and pregnancy.”