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The dispute over monosodium glutamate (MSG) is more complicated. Although it occurs naturally in some foods, especially mushrooms, sugar beets and green peas, it is not essential to life. Yet preparations of a seaweed have been used for thousands of years to lend savor to bland food and give it a "meaty" taste. Japanese chemists discovered in 1908 that an active ingredient of the seaweed is MSG. Not only many Americans but some Orientals as well suffer a sensitivity reaction to MSG—sold in the U.S. under the trade name Ac'cent—and virtually all such sensitive people will react to an excessive dose with discomforting, if temporary allergic symptoms. After recent outbreaks of this "Chinese restaurant syndrome," New York City's department of health has instructed cooks to use MSG sparingly, but no one knows what precise limits should be set.
The Popeye Problem. Two things prompted the Food and Drug Administration to undertake a detailed study of other possible effects of MSG. One was the recent publicity given to the fact that some baby foods are laced with the stuff—simply to titillate their mothers' palates, as Consumer Crusader Ralph Nader (TIME cover, Dec. 12) pointed out. (Gerber is no longer putting MSG into baby foods.) The second factor was a report by a St. Louis psychiatrist, Dr. John W. Olney, that when he injected MSG under the skin of newborn mice it caused brain damage and other developmental defects. Though this phenomenon may have no relevance to MSG's use in food, there is no medical evidence on the possible damage of concentrated MSG in a baby's bloodstream. In fact, many potentially harmful chemicals occur naturally in familiar foods. Spinach is rich in oxalic acid, which is the foundation for a common type of kidney stone. (Popeye in real life would have suffered endless agonies from passing stones.) Carotene, the pigment that puts the color in egg yolks, sweet potatoes, mangoes and carrots, is used by the body to make Vitamin A—but consumed in excess causes a kind of jaundice.
GRAS List. In crude or dilute form, nature supplies some of the substances that have recently gained notoriety as additives. The first additives, aside from salt and seaweed, were spices. Some contained natural preservatives. Benzoic acid, used as a preservative for almost a century, occurs naturally in berries and in some fruits, such as plums.
The first U.S. Pure Food and Drug Law, passed in 1906, gave, the enforcement authority (now the Food and Drug Administration) no power to rule on the safety of any substance that a food processor proposed to put in his packages. Not until 1958 did Congress give the FDA the power to pass on additives before they went on the market, but by then it had delayed so long that hundreds of additives had been in wide use for many years. So the new law contained a grandfather clause, exempting substances already employed and "generally recognized as safe (GRAS) for their intended use."