In today’s lecture, I’m going to talk about Monosodium Glutamate, or MSG, as it’s more commonly known. Now, MSG as you probably know, is a flavour enhancer which is used particularly in Chinese and Japanese cooking. Today I am going to explore why it is so popular in these cuisines and, more importantly, how does it enhance the flavour of food? The main reason why MSG is more commonly used in Japanese meals is tradition. For many thousands of years the Japanese have incorporated a type of seaweed known as kombu in their cooking, as they discovered it had the ability to make food taste better. But it wasn’t until 1908 that the ingredient in kombu which was responsible for the improvement in flavour was actually discovered to be glutamate by scientists working there. From 1908 until 1956, glutamate was produced commercially in Japan by a very slow and expensive means of extraction. It was in 1956 that the speed of the process was improved, and industrial production increased dramatically and still continues to increase to this day. In fact, hundreds of thousands of tones of MSG are produced all over the world today.