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A few years ago, Jennifer Gomez wash was watching this PBS cooking show.

And this chef, David Chang, started talking about MSG.

Monosodium glutees of meat.

And of course, lots of people believe MSG is bad for you.

Gives your headaches, food hangover.

That idea has been around for decades.

I grew up hearing this.

Maybe you did too.

But Jennifer knows this is a myth.

In fact, the very next segment on the show is science and food writer Harold McGee saying just that.

And he just had this sort of throwaway line that, yeah, this myth of MSG being harmful

can be traced back to one letter in the New England Journal of Medicine.

A letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine.

And I was just sort of sitting there and going, huh, one letter.

It was like, oh, it's an origin story.

At the time, Jennifer was a PhD student, very interested in the way people talk about race and Asian Americans.

So to hear that there was once this letter,

that led Americans to freak out about the dangers

of an ingredient commonly used in Chinese food, an ingredient that was later proven totally

...