Monosodium glutamate

Monosodium glutamate emerged from a question at dinner. In 1908, Kikunae Ikeda asked his wife what gave her vegetable and tofu soup its savory depth. She pointed to dried kombu seaweed, the foundation of traditional Japanese dashi. Ikeda, a chemistry professor at Tokyo Imperial University trained in Leipzig's physical chemistry laboratories, recognized that this flavor could not be categorized into the four accepted basic tastes. He named it umami—from the Japanese word for tasty—and set out to isolate its molecular source.

The adjacent possible had been building for decades. Karl Heinrich Ritthausen had isolated glutamic acid from wheat gluten in 1866, though its role in taste remained unknown. By the 1900s, acid hydrolysis techniques using hot hydrochloric acid could break down proteins into amino acids. Japan's Meiji-era science infrastructure, modeled on German universities, had created world-class chemistry laboratories at Tokyo Imperial University. And Japanese culinary tradition had developed acute awareness of dashi's savory character—a vocabulary for what Western science had not yet recognized.

Ikeda extracted thirty grams of glutamic acid from twelve kilograms of kombu in February 1908. He tested various glutamate salts—calcium, potassium, ammonium—finding that monosodium glutamate was most soluble, palatable, and easiest to crystallize. He filed his patent in April; by May 1909, Saburosuke Suzuki's company had launched commercial production as Ajinomoto—essence of taste.

The cascade transformed global food. Instant ramen seasoning packets, bouillon cubes, Doritos, frozen dinners—MSG became foundational to processed food. Production evolved from expensive protein hydrolysis to bacterial fermentation after 1957, when Japanese scientists isolated Corynebacterium glutamicum. Today's 3.5 million metric ton annual production feeds a $5-7 billion market. The Chinese Restaurant Syndrome controversy of 1968, now recognized as scientifically unfounded and tinged with xenophobia, could not slow umami's conquest.