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Comment by Tomte | Hacker News Reader

Nutrition labels in Germany often list "celery powder". That's not because the product needs any celery flavor (the powder is pretty much tasteless, as far as I understand), but because customers may be wary of "Natriumglutamat".

Manufacturers need to label every ingredient, so they don't use chemically synthesized MSG, but celery powder, which is virtually identical, but customers think it's organic and healthy, as opposed to the evil chemical MSG.

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It wouldn't suprise me if celery was relatively rich in glutamate given its use in stocks and mirepoix, but I think that celery powder is mostly used for its nitrate and nitrite content as a meat curing agent.

Celery salt, at least, is a game changer when making things like stews, gravies and sauces.

If I’m making a ‘western’ dish (for want of a better phrase) it is an essential ingredient to get the depth of flavour into the sauce. The only thing which I find is equally as good at attaining that depth is… celery

This is a common food labelling hack in the US when a manufacturer has a product like sausage or bacon which would normally be treated with sodium nitrate (curing salt) to maintain color and taste. When 'nitrate-free' became something the organic food crowd wanted to see on the label but grey meat was not going to be appealing in the package you suddenly found a lot of recipes that included some sort of celery extract because it was high in available nitrates.

tl;dr in the US this was more about nitrates and color of packaged meat than it was about glatamates.

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