Tasty waste: industrial fermentation and the creative destruction of MSG

ABSTRACT

Monosodium glutamate (MSG) traveled to America in the Pacific theatre of World War II. The flavor-enhancing food additive was known in the U.S. beforehand, but it was the experience of Japanese military rationing that drove American military and food industry interests to truly adopt the technology and to invest in domestic production. In 1957, researchers in Japan discovered a method of producing MSG with unprecedented efficiency and profitability: industrial fermentation. Industrial fermentation refers to the large-scale production of commercially valuable substances by growing selected microbial cultures on cheaply available raw materials. This paper explores how MSG came to be harvested at scale from the metabolic excretions or wastes of bacteria fed on other agri-industrial waste products (e.g., sugar, soy, wheat). The $8.4 billion (USD) Ajinomoto Company, Inc., founder and top global manufacturer of MSG (in addition to other seasonings, processed foods, beverages, amino acids, pharmaceuticals and specialty chemicals), has been fermenting glutamate from modified bacterial strains since roughly 1960. The profitability of the fermentation method provided the impetus for expanding the global MSG market in the postwar period, impacting the health and aesthetic value of foodways around the world.

KEYWORDS:

• Monosodium glutamate
• umami
• microbes
• industrial fermentation
• taste
• capitalism

Acknowledgments

I visited earlier versions of this paper on colleagues at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics; at the Association for the Study of Food (ASFS) annual conference; and at our “Edible Feminisms” workshop in February 2017. For this, I apologize. I am extremely thankful for the incisive and gracious feedback I received in those forums, from two anonymous reviewers for Food, Culture, and Society, and from Hannah Landecker, Chris Kielty, Rachel Vaughn, and Kyla Wazana Tompkins in particular.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Lactic acid (using Lactobacillales) was first identified by Louis Pasteur’s laboratory in 1857; citric acid (using Aspergillus niger) by James Currie in 1917 and commercialized by Pfizer in 1919; penicillin (using Penicillium notatum) by Alexander Fleming in 1944 and commercialized by the U.S.A. War board in 1944; and Streptomycin (using Streptomyces griseus) by Selman Waksman in 1944 and commercialized by Merck and Co, Ltd. in 1944.

2. At the time of the Chicago symposium in 1948, only a handful of domestic manufacturers of MSG were in operation. Two of these were the Huron Milling Company of Harbor Beach, Michigan and James E. Larrowe of Mason City, Iowa. While glutamic acid synthesis had been a known process in Europe since 1890 (a L. Wolff used a starting material of levulinic acid), compared with glutamate production from protein (hydrolysis and isolation), it was much more expensive, and the resulting product was usually the inactive, racemized form that is difficult to convert to the dextro configuration, or L-glutamate. However, in the 1960s, new techniques made direct chemical synthesis more feasible, and from 1962–1973, acrylonitrile was used as the starting material, and optical resolution of DL-glutamic acid was achieved with a process called preferential crystallization (Marshall 1948, 5; Manning and Buchanan 1948, 15–16; Yamaguchi and Ninomiya 2000).

3. WWI cut off the United States’ main source of potash for fertilizer – ninety percent had been imported from Germany; therefore, it became highly profitable for American companies to extract potassium salts from “Steffen’s wastewater,” named after the man who developed the processing of sugar from sugar beets. Of course, after the war ended, potash again became available from Germany, and domestic prices for potash plummeted, converting a lucrative war windfall into commercial dead weight.

4. International Mineral’s five other interests were phosphate minerals, phosphate chemicals, potash, plant foods, and industrial minerals. The Ac’cent brand was eventually acquired by Pillsbury and then sold in 1999 to B&G Foods Corporation, a leading processed foods conglomerate based out of Parsippany, New Jersey, whose products currently circulate in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico under nearly twenty different brand names (“Company News” 1998).

5. The metabolite, which is 2-oxo-glutarate (2-oxo-pentanedoic acid), is isolated through reductive ammonia fixation using the enzyme glutamate dehydrogenase, a “normal cellular constituent.” Sano (2009, 730S); Other species of glutamic acid bacteria were found discovered to be able to utilize hydrocarbons as a sole carbon source for growth – a fact that I understand to be the inspiration for consumer objections in the 1980s-90s in Japan that Ajinomoto was made from petrochemicals. These strains are discussed in Kinoshita, 1986.

6. In modern science (1800s- present), “basic” qualification has been granted based on a taste perception’s distinctiveness and the impossibility of reproducing it with a combination of the other tastes. Fatty taste has recently been granted “basic” status, and other contenders include kokumi (discussed elsewhere in this paper), carbohydrate, calcium, and metallic tastes. One research group, however, acknowledges the almost limitless potential for the discovery of additional molecular taste mechanisms (tastants and receptor sites dedicated to them) and argues that umami and fatty tastes should be called “alimentary” tastes instead of “basic” tastes (Hartley, Liem, and Keast 2019).

7. Michelle Murphy describes this as the “unintelligibility” of novel forms of chemical interrelation – often experienced as harm – in built environments (2006).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah E. Tracy

Sarah E. Tracy holds a PhD in the History of Science and Technology from the University of Toronto and lectures in the Food Studies program at the New School. Her research brings science and technology studies and gender, sexuality, and critical race approaches to the study of American food culture and has appeared in Radical History Review, Global Food History, and The Senses and Society. An interdisciplinary account of how flavor informs the boundaries of human identity, health, and behavior, her first book, Delicious: A History of Monosodium Glutamate and Umami, The Fifth Taste Sensation, is forthcoming from the University of California Press.