Even those of my friends who know that the health concerns are bogus have a weird paranoia of MSG. I think it's a general suspicion of any chemical which makes food taste better (which somehow doesn't apply to salt and sugar).
Hell, if we called table salt "Sodium Chloride" all the time, people would probably have a bit of a changed perspective.
None the less, MSG is delicious!
I just call it supersalt. Because it's like salt, but not salty!
Also -- despite what you may have learned in school -- the taste buds aren't mapped to areas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions (Search for Taste for links to the relevant sources)
Well-known umami-tasting foods include red meat, cheese and other fermented products, and tomatoes. None of these contain MSG directly (tomatoes get their umami from glutamic acid, according to umamiinfo.com). However, MSG can be used to add more umami flavour, which acts as a flavour enhancer.
"MSG is the sodium salt of glutamic acid" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate
So, MSG may or may not be bad by itself, but the highly processed empty calories that it hangs out with, definitely bad. Bet you can't eat just one? I don't take that bet anymore, I lose too often.
For some reason only in MSG does this quality inspire distrust.
The same holds true for the difference between eating fruit and drinking HCFS soda or the difference between drinking beer and distilled spirits.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00319384909...
Indeed, the most important finding concerning MSG showed that motivation to eat recovered more rapidly following a lunchtime meal in which MSG-supplemented soup was served as the first course (compared both with the effect of unsupplemented soup and no preload)
Regardless, MSG is exactly the sort of "industrial edible food-like product" that I'm avoiding for aesthetic reasons, if nothing else.