10 Downing Street, despite the unanimous clamor of the experts.Īll this is necessary background to the CNN story cited above. Yes, that’s also why Donald Trump is president of the United States and why Britain left the EU and put Boris Johnson back in No. Too many people have realized that expert opinions are simply another form of corporate public relations, meant to promote someone else’s bottom line at their expense, and have learned to ignore claims to expertise that contradict their own lived experience. That’s also what’s behind the massive crisis of legitimacy that’s shaking the industrial societies of the Western world right down to their foundations. That, in turn, is why so few people believe the food industry and their paid researchers when these insist that MSG doesn’t make anyone ill. If you think this doesn’t happen, go to your favorite search engine and look up the phrase “replication crisis.” Nearly all the research into the health effects of food these days is paid for by the food industry, which means that researchers who want to keep getting grants know perfectly well what results they have to turn up, and if you know the first thing about experimental design and statistics you know how easy it is to gimmick a study to get the results your sponsor has paid for. Care to guess who paid for them? If you said “the food industry,” good-you’re paying attention. The food industry is quick to point out that there have been all sorts of studies purporting to prove the nonexistence of “Chinese restaurant syndrome,” as the effects of MSG sensitivity are sometimes called. (MSG is in a lot of cheap salad dressings and flavored potato chips, for example, and people who are sensitive to it can’t eat those either without reacting. It also happens whether or not the food in question belongs to an Asian cuisine. That happens, by the way, whether or not they know there’s MSG in the food if you know people with MSG sensitivity, you quickly get used to hearing the words “Crap, there must have been MSG in that,” and glancing at the label to find out that they’re right. There’s also a larger penumbra of people-I’m one of them-who just feel a little queasy for a while when there’s too much added MSG in their food. Here I’m not just talking about the people who get the full-blown syndrome: dizziness, light-headedness, nausea, and so on. (Well, a little better.) So there’s a lot of MSG in a lot of processed food these days. That’s why the food industry adores it-you can dump some into a food product that’s cheaply made of low quality ingredients, and the result comes out tasting better than stale cardboard.
MSG is found naturally in small amounts in some foods but is manufactured in gargantuan quantities for industrial food production. Yes, it’s a CNN article, and yes, it’s really, truly, seriously trying to insist, in so many words, that if eating monosodium glutamate (MSG) makes you ill, you’re not actually ill, you’re racist.Ī little background may be useful here. for this one-and you can read it online here. The first of these signs, the absurd one, is a news story-tip of the druid’s hat to reader Earl King Jr.
One of them is a giddy absurdity, the other is an admission of total defeat, and it’s among the ironies of the situation that neither author realizes that these labels apply to their work. Still, regular readers of mine will not be surprised to learn that the signs I’m thinking about aren’t anything so obvious. The collapse of the Democratic attempt to get rid of Donald Trump via impeachment is one straw in the wind another, even more telling, is the frank confession by several Democratic movers and shakers that impeachment was the only way to stave off a Trump victory in this autumn’s election-and we don’t even have to bring up the Keystone Kops fiasco of the Iowa caucuses, which is still unfolding one embarrassment after another as I write these words. It may not be quite accurate to say that it’s all over but the shouting, but something of that sense seems to be catching on in America these days.
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