Chips and Chips

Marc: Hey, Renee. How's it going?

Renee: Hi, Marc.

Marc: So, okay, because I always get like random texts and stuff. My brother sends me this link a couple weeks ago, I don't know, last week, whatever. He was at a hockey game and he sees an advertisement for a frozen foods company, you know, he hadn't heard of. Why he decided to send me something about some frozen foods company, I don't know. But he thought it was interesting because he looked at this company, found out that the company makes coatings for chips as well as a bunch of food products. And my brother, never one to resist a bad dad joke, writes, they make coatings for chips and chips.

Renee: Of course. I know your brother. Of course you did. Chips and chips. Oh, that's gross. Chips and chips. Oh. Yeah, yeah.

Marc: So I wasn't sure what to think about it at first. I, you know, I didn't think it made a lot of sense. So I checked it out. I have to back up because there's a reason it pulled me in though, right? So when I started dating my wife, early nineties, she told me that her dad made Really good Chinese food. So I went over one night. It was, I, you know, go over there once in a while, um, while he's cooking and I'm standing in kitchen watching him work and he goes to the cupboard and he comes out with a bag of, you know, something. It's this giant size bag, Costco size bag to kind of, you know, I guess you would buy like flour or, you know, like. Like pancake mix you know that's the kind of the costco size pancake mix it's a big like durable bag

Renee: Right yeah yeah yeah.

Marc: And and it's msg

Renee: Together with a giant needle.

Marc: Yeah yeah right it's msg and he he puts them into the pan right and this is i don't know this is like 1993 94 right when msg has this kind of a reputation so i asked him you know what was what was it for He says, well, you know, makes it taste good. And that was the whole conversation. That was it. Because her dad's a man of very few words.

Renee: Wait, so was it good? Because I try to cook Chinese food. I'm terrible at it. Was it good?

Marc: He's a good cook, right? So I'm sure. But 30 years ago, I don't know, right? I don't know that he uses MSG anymore. So, but yeah, I'm sure it was probably pretty good.

Renee: Yeah. So I don't have a memory like that. but I do remember maybe like, maybe 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I don't know. Somebody, somebody WikiLeaked the, the 19 herbs and spices for Kentucky fried chicken. And everybody ran, ran and bought all the spices, but they didn't have anything else. They just had the list of spices. They didn't know how much and everybody was after it. How am I going to, they all want to make the KFC breading. So it's like, they're all like, oh, it's so close. What's missing? It's so close. And then somebody said, msg and then they all ran out and bought msg and came back and was like bang yep that's it so now you can go and download anybody's like recipe for that because everybody's is different because they all think they got it right yeah um but but that's that's that's it that's msg, you eat it all the time you have no idea what it's doing you, notice when it's not there um and yet you're Right. I think in my mind, it still has a bad reputation. They still associate it with Chinese food.

Marc: Right. Yeah. Yeah. We'll learn all about that in a minute. So, all right. So here's the link, right, between chips and chips. So the company is called Ajinomoto because, you know, it's Japanese, of course. They make MSG. But here's the thing that I think people like. It kind of blew my mind. They've made it since 1909. And on the same website, right next to the seasonings, right, there's a division that makes the insulating film inside computer processors. And it's called Ajinomoto Build-Up Film, or ABF. And it's in most of the high-end chips you can buy today, and they're the main supplier. The same company, same chemistry process, and there it is. Coatings for chips, MSG, and coatings for processors, ABF. Anyways, welcome to another episode of the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast, where we talk about technology, past, present, and future. And tonight, it's about Montesodium Glutamate.

Renee: Okay, so what's actually in that bag? Monosodium glutamate. Glutamate is an amino acid, one of the building blocks of protein, and it's already in a lot of what you already eat, right? Tomatoes, Parmesan, which is loaded over a thousand milligrams per hundred grams. Anchovies, dried mushrooms, soy sauce, soy sauce, cured ham. Oh, I had that today too. It's high in breast milk. So it's one of the first things anybody ever tastes. And the sodium part is just salt. So it's like your mother's breast milk and salt.

Marc: And salt. Marmite.

Renee: Marmite.

Marc: Vegemite. I never thought about Vegemite and Marmite. Vegemite, I always forget the difference between these things, but Vegemite or Marmite, one of the two, is basically like yeasty, sun-dried tomatoes, you know? So it's like, you might as well just pump, you know, inject the MSG into the veins right there. Oh, wow.

Renee: Yeah. Okay.

Marc: But the reason we have a name for this taste starts with a guy in Tokyo, and he's eating a bowl of soup. All right. So let me take you back. 1907. Ikeda Kika, and I apologize. I will butcher these names, but Ikeda Kikunai is a chemistry professor at Tokyo Imperial University, and he's eating tofu and dashi, which is a broth made from kombu, which is a kelp. And there's something in it that he can taste that, you know, it's not really sweet or salty, sour, bitter. Those were the four, you know, taste variables, right? Yeah. That was the entire model, and it had been the entire model for a very long time. Those are the four. Even when I was a kid, I remember those are the four tastes, sweet salt, bitter sour. But he goes and he works through just a ton, all sorts of this enormous quantity of kombu. He extracts it. He crystallizes out the compound responsible, and it comes back as the salt of glutamic acid. And that's 1908. Right. And he gives the taste a name, umami.

Renee: Umami, which translates to what roughly?

Marc: Savoriness.

Renee: Oh, nice.

Marc: Deliciousness, right? There isn't really a great English word for it, which is part of why the West spent, you know, 80 years insisting it was just some combination of the other four rather than a taste in its own right. So the receptor didn't get identified until the early 2000s. That's a hundred years. That's crazy.

Renee: That's 100 years of I know more than you because I'm French. Yeah.

Marc: There you go.

Renee: That's what that is.

Marc: I'm adding all this cream in here, which I know it tastes good.

Renee: And butter. More butter.

Marc: More butter. More butter. Yeah. But once somebody actually found the actual protein on the tongue that binds glutamate, then the argument basically stops. It's like, okay, well, there are five tastes. So there you go.

Renee: And it doesn't behave like the other four, which contributed to why it wasn't lumped into the other four. Sweet arrives and announces itself. And if you're me, it does it all day long. Soda, cake. I just, hi, sweetie. That's what I say. Umami spreads. It coats the sides of your tongue, and it's still there after you swallowed. And it makes your mouth water, which is a physical response, not a figure of speech. And it also makes food feel thicker than it is. A stalk with it in it tastes like it's got body, like there's something to chew. The same stalk without it tastes thin. I don't know, like somebody took something out. Definitely didn't tell you. Oh, that makes egg drop soup make sense. Did you ever see how thick egg drop soup is? Yeah.

Marc: And what was I? Oh, this was funny. It's sort of off track here, but I was watching another sort of taste thing, and a guy reverse engineered Coca-Cola, and one of the ingredients was glycerin. And the only reason I know, the only reason that you add glycerin is because if you don't, it's quite thin and your mouth feels a little like weird. So it needs that extra body in it. So maybe they could have added, you know, MSG.

Renee: MSG instead of something flammable. I don't know. Why is that a thing? Is glycerin flammable? I don't know. I don't know.

Marc: So anyways, every taste does something for you, right? Sweet tells you there's energy in this. Bitter tells you to be careful. This might be poison. Sour tells you it's unripe or it's gone off. Salt tells you there are minerals. Umami tells you there's protein. Free glutamate is the marker. So if something's got glutamate in it, there's a decent chance there's a protein nearby. My mouth's watering now as I'm talking about this.

Renee: And we developed a.

Marc: Taste for it and a preference for more of it.

Renee: And it concentrates. Anything you do to food that takes time is making more of it. A raw tomato has some. Dry that same tomato in the sun and you got several times as much because the water's gone and the glutamate stayed. Age a cheese for two years, and the proteins come apart into free amino acids, and some of those crystallize out, which is that crunchy bit that's an old Parmesan. Cure a ham. I know that, right? Yeah, yeah. Is that glass? I don't care if it is. Yeah, yeah. Cure a ham, dry a mushroom, leave a fish sauce in a barrel for a year. It's all the same process. Time does it. Heat does it. Salt does it. Bacteria do it. every traditional preservation method on earth is also a glutamate factory people inventing those preservation methods didn't know they were concentrating crystalline structures of glutamate they just knew to keep the food usable and that tastes good you know what my favorite show is lately like i'm on season 12 there's like 14 of them like i'm almost, i'm starting to pace myself now because i don't want to lose it alone yeah, alone so like they just oh they take some but They take a group of people, they stick them out in the wilderness alone, and they leave them there. And last man standing wins. And sometimes that's like 90 days. And they're up at the Arctic Circle. And they're right before winter hits. They've got enough time to build a shelter, build a smoker, put their meat in it, hope they can preserve it long enough that they make it another 50 days. That's what they're trying to do in the first 10 days, right? It's crazy. Two women have won. Thank you very much. And one of the women has spent the longest time above the Arctic Circle than anyone else in any of the series. Wow. So like, yeah, crazy, crazy, crazy. At any rate, that's what they're doing. Like they have to do all that stuff. They have to, they try to figure out how to preserve all the vegetables that they find or the fruits that they find. And they're definitely trying to deal with the rabbits and everybody's after a moose. And if they get one... Oh, my God. Well, you're ascetic if you can get it skinned fast enough, dried quick enough, and the bears don't come get you, or the wombats or whatever the hell else is out there coming to get your stuff while you're sleeping.

Marc: Wrong hemisphere. Wrong hemisphere.

Renee: Polar bears, then.

Marc: Polar bears, yeah. Okay, yeah.

Renee: At any rate, yeah.

Marc: Wombats. Well, speaking of preservation, you know, shameless plug for the refrigerator episode, so you can go check that out. But yeah, glutamate, right? It's the same thing in a slow-cooked ragu. Three hours on the stove is three hours of pulling the glutamate out of the meat. And it's part of the reason the whole thing is better essentially the next day.

Renee: So when somebody tells you MSG is unnatural, the compound is sitting in the tomato. It's sitting in the Parmesan that they're about to put on top of that tomato. So...

Marc: Maybe not so unnatural. Yeah. Yeah. So people have been hunting, you know, this flavor profile for about 2,000 years without any idea what they were hunting. Romans had, this is my favorite thing, being like a classics degree holder here, right? The Romans had garum.

Renee: Oh, oh, it's coming in handy. Everybody, wait, Marc's major is coming in handy. Go.

Marc: Yeah, yeah, exactly. A fish sauce. You take small, oily fish, kind of like mostly sardines. You layer them with salt in stone vats and you leave them in the sun for weeks or months while the fish digest themselves. Mmm. Renee's making the best face here. Yeah. And what drains off is garum. And then they put it on everything. It's in most of the recipes we've got from Roman kitchens. And people make it now. They like, you know,

Renee: They get- How do you make it now? How do you even know what's in it?

Marc: Well, that's the thing, right? They have some kind of loose recipes. And so that's what people do. Like, if they're really nuts, you know, or not nuts, but, you know, dedicated, let's say. And they're like, I'm going to, you know, replicate Garam. And they try to do it. But they do have some idea of what it looks like chemically because they have found, you know, found it preserved and, you know, sealed, you know, vessels and things like that. So people do go for it. But yeah.

Renee: So how do we know what was in it?

Marc: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, there you go. So there's a building in Pompeii that people call the garum shop, and there was still residue in the vessels when it was excavated. So they run a chemical analysis. The dominant flavor compound is monosodium glutamate. And so everybody has their own kind of spin on it and the recipes for it.

Renee: So it's in the actual Roman sauce.

Marc: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, 1800 years before Ikeda gave it a name, The most popular condiment in the Roman Empire was mostly MSG and salt in a nasty-smelling liquid form, though.

Renee: Did your food smell so bad that this made it smell different?

Marc: I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. I know. Fish sauce. It doesn't sound appealing at all,

Renee: But apparently— I like miso, so I don't know.

Marc: Yeah.

Renee: Right? I don't know that—I have no words. Okay. And the same thing is happening independently everywhere else. Fish sauce all through Southeast Asia.

Marc: See? Yeah.

Renee: Soy sauce. Miso in Japan and China, which is soybeans and a mold doing the same protein breakdown. Like, I love miso. Like, I love miso. Like, I would just... Yeah, I love it. tofu, I don't care what you put in it either, fermented shrimp pasties.

Marc: Yeah, just pasties. Pasties.

Renee: Every one of those cultures worked out that if you take something protein-rich and you let it break down under salt, what comes back makes everything else taste better. No one could say why. And then when it reached England, which is where it gets silly, right? 18th century English sailors run into fermented sauce in Asia. Well, how do I say this?

Marc: Yeah, I don't know. Hokkien? Yeah.

Renee: Hokkien? No, because you've been doing good... Yeah. It's called K...

Marc: K-Syap. Yeah. Syap. Like, that's the precursor to ketchup.

Renee: Oh. Yeah. Which means preserved fish sauce. Yeah. Oh, that's nice. They bring the word home and the taste with it, and the English cooks start trying to reproduce something they'd only ever tasted with none of the ingredients and none of the techniques.

Marc: Yeah. So what did they use, you know, when they were trying to do this?

Renee: Yeah, whatever they had, right? So mushrooms, walnuts, oysters, anchovies. There are 18th century English recipes for mushroom ketchup, walnut ketchup, oyster ketchup, all the thin and dark and salty and used the way you'd use a stock cube, right? Like, you know, like the chicken bouillon cube, right? And that list is very high glutamate ingredient available in Britain at the time. They were reverse engineering umami by taste alone with no idea. The molecule existed, and they landed on the right ingredients every time. Hey, that's a good palate for a bunch of guys, you know, working at a pub, don't you think?

Marc: Yep, by taste alone. So, yeah, yeah.

Renee: Worcestershire sauce comes out the same lineage. Fermented anchovies, tamarind, vinegar, left to age in its barrels. It's a Victorian British garum sitting in every table at every pub. And the tomato shows up late. The first published tomato ketchup recipe in 1812, a man is called James Mee's in Philadelphia. Everything before that is fish, fungus, or nuts. So we don't have tomato ketchup until like after we've been eating Roman garum for two centuries, 10 centuries, I don't know, like a really long time.

Marc: Yeah, yeah. I know. But all the precursors to ketchup weren't about like sugary tomatoey. It was, you know, savory. Mushroomy.

Renee: Yeah. And no, I wouldn't have been into that. Not one bit. And I love ketchup. I would not be into that. I love mushrooms. I wouldn't be into that.

Marc: Yeah. Mushroom ketchup sounds weird, but like they weren't trying to do, you know, like modern They weren't holding

Renee: It to a standard, right? Like, here's what it is. Try to do that.

Marc: They didn't have Heinz, you know? They didn't have Heinz.

Renee: I would like this just on the record, that if I come to your restaurant and you don't have Heinz, I say something.

Marc: Really?

Renee: Yes. I don't understand it. It's the same amount of money. It's just a way better ketchup. And I'm from Pittsburgh. You just don't even know what it's like when it's vinegar day downtown. You smell the vinegar everywhere. You just don't even know.

Marc: Well, vinegar has some of that umami taste profile. so But, you know, here in the UK, yeah, some of the pubs will have Heinz, but a lot of them will have homemade ketchup, which is interesting because it's not quite as sweet, but it's really good consistency.

Renee: No, and they all think they're clever when they add the allspice because everybody adds allspice to their homemade ketchup.

Marc: Whatever. Yeah. Anyways, okay, so let's come back to Japan. So we talked about, you know, the past of MSG, but this is where the science comes in. this is where the real tech revolution is. So, Ikeda files a patent in April of 1908 and gets it in July of the same year. Then he takes it to a businessman called Suzuki Saburosuke, again, apologize for their names, who was running an iodine company at the time and asked him to manufacture it. They start selling it in 1909. So, a couple years after he was at the university and he figures this out. The product's called Ajinomoto, which translates roughly to essence of taste. And the company ends up taking its name from the product. So Ajinomoto.

Renee: So how do you actually make it in 1909?

Marc: Yeah. Okay. All right. So here we go. You take wheat gluten and hydrolyze it with hydrochloric acid, which tears the protein. Yum. Yeah, I know. It sounds tasty, right? Which tears the protein apart into its component amino acids. So the hydrochloric acid is what sort of breaks it apart. And then you separate the glutamic acid back out of that mess. And it works. It's slow. It's also corrosive. You need a lot of gluten to get a little product. And you're left with a great deal of material you weren't trying to make. And that's a process for something like 40 years.

Renee: Yeah, hydrochloric acid. So my dog was, we thought she had a problem with her, intestines that wasn't cancer. She was on a hydrolyzed diet. And so the dog food goes through that process. I'm not not with hydraulic hydrochloric acid like it wouldn't be that but be something else to break down the proteins yeah, so that your body doesn't recognize it as a protein so that you can get protein and even if you had a protein allergy because your body doesn't think it it got it it got it for sure but molecularly speaking it didn't recognize it right yeah so like that's it's a crazy thing right so, so okay so hydrochloric again I'm pretty sure my dog wasn't eating the runoff from a hydrochloric acid thing.

Marc: I don't know. I mean, the hydrolyzed process, they might have been using HCL. I don't know. I don't know.

Renee: Okay. So what changes? All right. So the 50s, right?

Marc: 1950s. The Japanese researchers go looking for a bacterium that produces glutamate naturally, and they find one in a soil sample. Corindobacterium glutamicum my daughter my daughter who recently just got her phd you know she you know her phd in microbiology she should probably be you know disappointed the way that i said that but anyways it makes glutamate as part of its ordinary metabolism and under the right conditions it makes far more than it needs and pushes the excess out through the cell wall So you stop tearing weed apart with hydrochloric acid and you start feeding sugar to bacteria.

Renee: So it becomes a fermentation. Yeah. Yeah. You know what? Like, I've been to Maker's Mark. I get it. Same family as beer, yogurt, vinegar, soy sauce. You're not really manufacturing it anymore. You're farming it. You're farming it. Yeah.

Marc: So what they do is they feed it molasses or starch or sugarcane. They hold it in a tank at the right temperature and the right pH, and the bacteria do the work. This is, you know, normal, like, you know, fermentation at a mass scale process, right? Then you filter the broth off, you concentrate it, you crystallize the glutamate out, and wash and dry the crystals. What comes out the other end is this white powder in, you know, in the bag that I saw my father-in-law messing with. And it's identical, you know, it's the identical molecule to what's in, you know, whatever, Parmesan or whatever.

Renee: When it doesn't come out the other end.

Marc: Yeah, okay. So everything else, right? So you have the crystals on one side and then everything else on the other. So at an industrial scale, a lot of what's in the tank isn't the thing you were after. You've got the spent broth, the biomass, leftover amino acids, all the co-products of growing bacteria in enormous volume. And Agenomoto ends up sitting on literally a mountain of this stuff.

Renee: Which most companies would pay someone to take away. Right. And the bourbon distillers, they used to scoop it up and take it up the hill to the dairy farms because the cows loved it. Cows loved mash. And so they would just take it up the hill and sell it to them. They would give them the money for the mash. They would take that money, go buy barrels. It was a whole thing. It was a whole thing.

Marc: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway. But yeah, they have a whole ton of it, though.

Renee: In April 1968, oh, I'm not born yet.

Marc: Yet.

Renee: Close. But mom's pretty uncomfortable. The New England Journal of Medicine runs a letter from a physician called Robert Ho Manquok.

Marc: Yeah, I don't know.

Renee: Yeah, okay. I know Amy. He says he feels off after eating at Chinese restaurants in the States. Numbness at the back of his neck, weakness, palpitations. He said he doesn't know what's causing it. He offers three possibilities, the cooking wand, the sodium, or the MSG. He didn't make any accusations. He was merely asking whether anyone else had noticed. Hey, anybody else notice this is happening? And that was the whole letter. The whole letter. Not the tweet. Just the letter. It wasn't even a tweet.

Marc: It wasn't research. You know, it wasn't like a published article. It was like, hey,

Renee: You know what? Hey, I wonder.

Marc: Yeah.

Renee: I wonder. Anybody else feel this? The journal ran it under the heading Chinese Restaurant Syndrome. And that heading is the part that got you out. Within a year, it's in the newspapers. Within a few years, everybody knows it. And nobody's gone back to read the letter because why would you? The name already tells you what it is. Then in 1969, a researcher called John only publishes work on mice. He injects, oh, I hate when they inject newborns, newborn mice with MSG up to, four milligrams per gram of their body weight, and then does a second round up to seven. He finds brain lesions, and that gets reported as MSG-causing brain damage. It was in a metal, this is why there's anti-vaxxers, I just want this. It was one guy talking about his friend's kid. That's what you guys are basing all that science on. This is the same stupid thing. Okay, go ahead.

Marc: I just thought it was interesting, you know, because we've talked about sort of that, you know, viral, right, and advertising and, you know, the kind of. You know how marketing you know picks something up and then it spreads and this is exactly that and this is

Renee: Doing it with an without a neural network and social media yeah right so like that's even weirder like like a year later we're all like oh chinese restaurants bad.

Marc: I didn't even bother because i know that it's like it would have trapped me in some sort of rabbit you know rat hole to go down around Chinese restaurant. It's the 60s, you know, the sort of inherent racism, you know, just like ethnic, you know, whatever. And, you know, but that is a letter asking a question turns into Chinese food or Chinese restaurant syndrome, you know, it's just

Renee: To call it a syndrome, too, because it makes it sounds like it's legitimate. Yeah, I know.

Marc: It just struck me the wrong way. And then to see this research, right, you know, the way that it was handled. So, you know, it's gets it.

Renee: That's crazy. Like one rat had lesions like.

Marc: OK, but yeah, that

Renee: Doesn't mean anything. Right. That's a long way to go from a rat brain to a human.

Marc: Yeah. Yeah. And look, it was injected into the newborn mice. Right. It skips the entire digestive system, right? Which is the part that would normally deal with glutamate before it went anywhere near a brain.

Renee: A brain, yeah.

Marc: Like if you injected, you know, like inject food, you know, into somebody's, you know, head or something.

Renee: Oh my God, it reminds me of that, that back to the, no, that behind the music where like Tommy Lee is like, dude, we were mainlining Jack Daniels. We could have just drank it. What were you thinking? We could have just drank it. We didn't need to mainline it.

Marc: Like... It's food. It's meant to go in your mouth, you know? But anyways, it just goes to show you, like, here's this problem. Then there's a study. The study is wrong, right? Clearly, you know, all of the properly designed studies came later. Double blind, taken by mouth. That amounts people actually eat. Nobody could reproduce the lesions or any of the negative things. So anyways, I think this media picks it up and doubles down on the MSG bad zeitgeist. You know, that's the it's easy, right? It's an easy thing to sort of it's like early clickbait, you know.

Renee: So meanwhile, Chinese restaurants in America has no MSG in the window. Restaurant owners are putting up signs disavowing an ingredient used across most of Asian cooking to reassure customers who have been eating the same compound all week in chips and canned soup and seasoning packets that they'll be fine, right? And in 1993, Chinese restaurant syndrome is an entry in Merriam-Webster's dictionary.

Marc: Yeah, nobody wrote to a journal.

Renee: And it's not even a thing.

Marc: It's not even a thing. It's not even a thing. Nobody writes to a journal about Doritos, by the way, you know? So, yeah. Anyways, there's a bit of a code on this. It's just sort of funny. In 2019, an American surgeon says the original letter was a hoax. Says he wrote it for himself for a $10 bet with a colleague and made up the name Robert Homan Kwok as a joke. Then it gets picked up everywhere.

Renee: It's because it's a good story. And it was wrong. Kwok was a real proposition. He really did write the letter, and his family confirmed it after the fact. So the debunk was itself a myth, and it traveled exactly the way the first one did. And, Anjinomoto pushed all of this on us for years, and Merriam-Webster revised the entry in 2020. The company ran a campaign called No MSG, K-N-O-W.

Marc: Oh, how cute.

Renee: MSG, yeah, with a symbol designed to see precisely where the No MSG signs go. Oh, that's good. That's good outreach, right? No MSG. Yeah. It's in that stupid tomato. Stop it.

Marc: Stop it. I know. It's just...

Renee: Of all the things that can slowly kill you, that's not the one.

Marc: Exactly. Exactly. They don't put MSG in the Chinese food here, but I'm smoking like a chimney in a restaurant. Hold on. Hold on. Let me light up this cancer stick while I shovel some more MSG-free food.

Renee: No MSG food in my face. You know, it doesn't matter. You're smoking. Like, you ruined your palate anyway. It wouldn't matter to you.

Marc: Hold on. Let me pound six, you know, Diet Cokes here. And get me the ketchup.

Renee: All right, go ahead.

Marc: Yeah. So that's one half of the story here, right? So Ajinomoto, the whole path to, you know, creating MSG and then, you know, the press around it, right? So that's the seasoning side of it. The other half of the story starts in the 70s. when Ajinomoto starts looking at what to do with the leftovers from the fermentation. So they've got mountains of this stuff, right? They've got the material. They've got a building full of chemists. I love this about Japan. Like, they figure stuff out. And it turns out some of the amino acid chemistry behaves well when you put it into epoxy resins. There's a whole chemistry lesson on why they figure these byproducts would work with resins. But the short story is that resins need a certain set of chemicals to harden. And these serve as good hardeners. So they start doing that. And they do that for about 20 years with not a lot to sell for it at the end of that.

Renee: First, I'm stunned. I'm just telling you, who thinks like, hey, let's stick that, hey, resin. Resin gets hard.

Marc: Yeah, exactly.

Renee: So does the mucus. Like, I don't understand. Like, how do we get here? How do we get here? Yeah.

Marc: When I was doing the research for this, I thought the same thing, right? And I was like, what the, you know?

Renee: Yeah, right?

Marc: Like, it only makes sense to a chemist that works in this field.

Renee: So, of course. Fair enough. Yeah. All right.

Marc: Yeah.

Renee: From now on, though, something gets stiff. I'm just going to be like egg whites. Like, epoxy. Epoxy. Same difference. And then the computer industry i'm gonna keep going you guys because it's just this is and then the computer industry hits a wall through the 90s processors get more complex and the packaging has to change with them how much memory and, have we handled in the 90s i would yeah, yeah yeah yeah you go from a lead frame which is basically metal legs coming off of a chip to a substrate with wiring running all through it in layers because you need hundreds of connections coming off the die instead of dozens, and every layer of that wiring needs an insulating layer between it and the next one and that insulating layer is as, is a much harder problem than it sounds it has to be thin single digit microns, thin it has to be perfectly flat, across the whole panel, because if it isn't, the wiring you put on top of it isn't flat either. It has to survive being heated and cold thousands of times without cracking or lifting off the layer underneath. It has to hold its shape while you drill microscopic holes through it to connect one layer to the next. And it has to come out identical every single time across millions of units because one defect anywhere in that stack kills the whole chip, yeah so god damn that was fun i haven't talked about like chips since like in a really long time like that's taking me home.

Marc: Chips and chips chips and chips so yeah yeah it's cool right like yeah who would have thought

Renee: Yeah that's so.

Marc: So anyway so who do you ask right in 1996 a cq manufacturer comes to ajinomoto and asks whether their amino acid production technology could be turned into an insulating film. A researcher called Nakamura Shigeo runs that work, and they had it working in a handful of months, four months. So it goes on a sale in 1999 as Ajinomoto build-up film, and in the early 2000s, packaging shifts from ceramic substrates to organic ones, and it becomes the standard. More than 75% of high-end processors now, and they're the dominant supplier.

Renee: Oh, fantastic. So just like airbags. We're all buying them from the same Japanese manufacturer.

Marc: And blue LEDs, remember?

Renee: And blue LEDs. Way to go, everybody. Way to diversify the supply chain. Anyway, coatings for chips and chips. I like it.

Marc: That's right.

Renee: The food side has a future that's more interesting than it sounds. MSG carries about a third the sodium of table salt by weight, and it does enough of the savory work that you can pull the salt back and the food still tastes like something. There's work going on now using it to cut sodium in processed food, which matters because high sodium is a population-level problem and every attempt to fix it by asking people to eat less salt has failed, mostly because they just can't eat less. The other one is plant-based. If you're building something out of pea protein that's meant to satisfy the way meat does, umami is what's missing and it's the hardest part to fake. Wait a minute, which is the exact problem this company has been working on since 1909. When your daughter came to visit, she was touring schools in the United States, and your whole family, all those girls, are vegetarians. Yeah. So we go to a vegetarian restaurant in downtown L.A. Because we live on the we live in East L.A. So we came into downtown with your wife and your kids and we go to a vegan restaurant where Keeley orders a bacon burger, a bacon burger, a bacon burger. Now I'm starting to think, oh, wait a minute. It was the cured spices that you would have in bacon, like just in a mushroom patty, like just be fair here. It's a mushroom patty. Right. But I said, I said to her, can I taste it? She says, yeah. She cut me off a piece and I tasted it. I looked her right in the eye and I said, I swear to God, have you ever tasted bacon? She's like, no. I'm like, this is it. This is it. This is what bacon exactly, it tastes exactly like this. And now that you say it, because I have never gotten that burger out of my head, that must be it. It must be the MSG, right? That makes that mushroom taste like a burger.

Marc: Yeah. I mean, that's the Umabi, you know, flavor profile that meat has, you know, in gobs, you know, that's the, yeah, it makes, yeah, it makes sense. So.

Renee: Well, there you go. Even today, we're using it to fool Renee into thinking mushrooms or bacon.

Marc: Yeah. Well, I mean, I've been vegetarian for seven, almost seven years. Yeah, almost seven years. And, you know, to be honest, like, okay, we went to a place, went to a Mexican place in the city Saturday, I think. And, and unfortunately, one of the things that one of the kids, they accidentally brought the wrong thing and it had meat in it but like when i looked at it and felt it and tasted it it's like i couldn't i couldn't tell if it was real meat or not you know

Renee: Yeah like yeah.

Marc: You know

Renee: I don't know.

Marc: Could have been anything you know but anyways all right so on the chip side though you know they we get like 10 15 20 years of of abf and now it's on the way out

Renee: Oh come on already Not already.

Marc: Yeah. Well, and who's to blame? AI, of course. AI packages get big. And when the package is that big and it's running that hot, the organic substrate flexes. It bends and warps under the heat. The industry term for that is potato chipping.

Renee: Potato chipping.

Marc: Yeah. Yeah. Potato chipping. So they're moving to glass. Well, and it's called potato chipping because of that warp, the way that it warps and bends and ships. It looks like a Pringle, you know.

Renee: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Marc: Anyway, so they're moving to glass. A glass core expands and contracts in almost exactly the same way as silicon. So it stays flat and you can run connections through it at that much higher density than you can through organic material. Intel and Samsung are both standing out of glass lines now. The very large packages people are planning for the end of the decade or so don't work on organic substrate at all.

Renee: So it got 25 years as the industry standard and now it's being replaced because the chips got too hot and they started curling. I mean, here, lesson to all of you. Until included. Yeah. Like you can, you can be running out front forever and then there's a breakthrough and you're gone.

Marc: Yeah. Well, you know, that, because those, those production lines are, they're super expensive to set up, you know? And, you know, to only get 20, 25 years out of a production line that costs them hundreds of billions to build, you know, that's, that's rough, you know? Yeah.

Renee: Yeah.

Marc: Anyways, what gets me in this whole thing is that I had all this for, you know, let's say 30 years. So never joined any of it up. Right. I watched, you know, my father-in-law put, you know, MSG in a bag and, you know, in Chinese food or whatever, 93, 94. And I've been buying processors. We've been working on processors forever. Right. Since I was a teenager building machines of seven. You know, my brother sends me this link and it's kind of this, you know, funny. But there's this, you know, this line running from, you know, the first to the second, you know, all the way through Rome into fish vats and a bowl of kelp broth in 1907 and a fermentation tank and 20 years of somebody asking, you know, hey, what are those leftovers good for? So, Yeah.

Renee: And none of it was a signpost. There's no reason you'd ever go looking. You'd have to already know the answer to to think of the question. Right.

Marc: Yeah. I mean, at first when I was researching this, I thought of, you know, Jack from 30 Rock, Jack Donahue. His title is Vice President of East Coast Television or Microwave Oven Programming. Because NBC was owned by GE at the time. And I thought, oh, this is sort of like that, right? This strange big, you know, how strange big companies get.

Renee: But this is also talk about like Jackie would always talk about like other divisions, like the submarine division.

Marc: Yeah, they're equally as strange, you know, like, you know, these big companies, these conglomerates. And that's what it felt like at first. You know, somebody making microprocessor coatings and then also frozen foods and flavor seasoning or whatever. But it's not.

Renee: It's Hutsucker Proxy. They didn't just make Hulu Oops. Right? Hey, Hula Hoops, save them.

Marc: Yeah, but this is different. They made one product, they kept the waste, and they spent 20 years asking about it before anybody wanted any answers about it, which is kind of almost stranger than what happens in these big companies and how they get bigger. I can't imagine somebody like GE thinking, oh, we have this byproduct from whatever, microwave, magnetrons, You know, what can we do with that?

Renee: I don't think we think like that anymore. I think there was probably a time we thought like that, right? Either it was hard to get or it was expensive to get, so you used it all. Or it was difficult to get because you had to go kill it yourself, so you used it all. Right? Like, I think we got way far away from that. We didn't, we don't, we don't think like that. I mean, I, last time I went and bought a car, I swear to you, the guy said, these are practically disposable now. Yeah. Like, what are you talking about? Like, I'm going to drive this thing for the next 15 years. Like, disposable? Like, are you crazy? It's a car. Like, but that's how they look at it. You're going to lease it for three years. You're going to give it back. It's going to go off somewhere else, and I'm going to have a brand new car for you. Like, that's how they look at it. Not that there's actually another car driving around the road, right? So, like, maybe what I like about the story is adaptation.

Marc: Yeah.

Renee: Right? The idea that, you know, I started out as one thing. And when that one thing, you know, it did what it was going to do, everybody, we saved it. Yay. But then when an opportunity came by. I adapted and I ran it for another 25 years and made even more money in something else. And then, you know, maybe the old man was an old man and the kids didn't want the business. And so now it's time to just sell it.

Marc: Oh, they're into frozen foods now.

Renee: Yeah. Right. So, yeah, I don't know. I think that's what I like about it. I like that he adapted and adapted and adapted. And there's been plenty of times in my life when people came to me and said, wouldn't it be great if we did this? And I'd be like, that's so much work. No. And neither of us are talented enough to pull it off. Right. But that was someone who thought, yeah, I could do that. Like, why not? Hey, do you have something that does this? Yeah, I got this stuff. I got this stuff. The cows, I can quit feeding it to the cows. And now I can just use it here, right? Like, yeah. And I'll say this. If you've never done the Bourbon Trail and you don't mind Kentucky, shout out to Kentucky. I've done the Bourbon Trail three times. Thank you very much. So if you go on the Bourbon Trail and you visit the distilleries, right, and you start to realize that those are villages. So you know makers mark they get their water close by they get their, wheat up the road they take their mash to the dairy farms um they like it's just an ecosystem right that's what this guy lived in that's what he lived in he lived in an ecosystem he just needed the rest of the ecosystem to come ask him for what he had right like i think that's what's cool about that i like that.

Marc: It is cool. I just, you know, working for a Japanese company ages ago, and I do see that as well. It's a different kind of motivation for some of these Japanese companies than what we see in the quarter to quarter.

Renee: I also think it's cultural too, right? Like all I'll say is anytime the Japanese fans were at a stadium in the United States for the World Cup, they cleaned up after themselves literally. Like those people came in with their trash bags and their gloves on and they had nothing to do. They took out their phones and took photos and said, I wish more people were like this.

Marc: Yeah.

Renee: Like, yeah, crazy. All right. Anyway, if you've walked past the no MSG sign in a window and never thought about it, it's worth knowing what that sign was doing there. And if you got a bag of it in the cupboard, you were way ahead of the curve.

Marc: If you're listening to this on something with a processor in it, there's a film in there that started as the leftovers from a seasoning factory.

Renee: Love that. Like, literally, I'm talking into it right now. I know, is that cool? I know it is. Damn it. And no one died. Did you notice in this episode, no one died?

Marc: No one died.

Renee: In the pursuit of MSG, no one had to pay with their life. Yay.

Marc: Well, that we didn't uncover, you know, in the research.

Renee: Yeah, you know what? I'm going to go back to the timeline. Maybe I'll find somebody. Anyway, this is the Nostalgic Nerd Podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Subscribe, follow, share this with someone who still thinks MSG is bad for them. Be gentle. They've had a long 50 years. It's not getting any easier. We'll see you next time. Thanks, Martin.