Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 77

Section 6 Classified Insida Chicago Tribuna Monday, October 3, 1 979 1 HUB WC'SU Chinese food make you crazy? MSG is No. 1 suspect By Carol Kleiman The man, his machine, his revolution business executive orders shrimp with lobs-, ter sauce at his favorite. Chinese restau- rant, eats it with gusto and chopsticks, and within 20 minutes gets dizzy, nauseous. By Cheryl Lavin I feels the onset of a blinding headache, and Ly fears he may be having a heart attack. A i I 1 5 3 i .4.

I 1 magazine editor sits down to an order of moo shu pork, takes a few delicate bites, and suddenly feels a "burning, a tightness, a numbness" In her upper arms, throat, neck, and face. She also has an irresistible urge to take oft all her clothes, which she manages to resist. For many people, the delights of sweet and sour pork and egg too yung are offset by a malady called the Chinese Restaurant Syndrome, the Orient i answer to Mexico's better-known Montezuma's Revenge. The Chinese Restaurant Syndrome is not a reaction to Oriental decor, as its name implies. Instead, it is caused by the food additive and flavor enhancer known as mono-sodium glutamate (MSG) and used freely in Chinese foodstuffs.

Glutamates are naturally present in foods "such as onions, tomatoes, and mushrooms. People eat doses of MSG all the time Accent, for instance, is MSG but Chinese restaurants seem to' use the seasoning more liberally than other food purveyors. In fact, when epidemiologists in the New York City Health Department first investigated the syndrome in 1965, they found that two pounds of MSG were routinely added to 1,500 egg rolls with sweet and sour sauce and hot mustard on the side. And won ton soup often floats in MSG. WHY DOES SOMETHING that makes food taste so good make so many feel so bad? The answers are not known as yet, even by those who can evenly divide five pieces of barbecued pork: among four diners.

What is known is that MSG is a glutamate, which means it's an amino acid. Amino acids are the constituents of protein, so not all glutamates cause distress. "Glutamates are present in the blood but are contained within nerve cells, which keep them in a benign condition where they can't do any harm, says Dr. John W. Olney of Washington University Medical School in St.

Louis. "If they leak out, they could be toxic to neurons in the nervous system. But glutamates are inside the brain to begin with." It's when additional, "free-form," raw glutamates such as MSG, enter the body that the Chinese Restaurant Syndrome often feasts bn the diner. Dr. Olney, a neuropathologist, psychiatrist, and researcher, studies the relationship between MSG and infant brain damage.

His research was instrumental in getting baby fdood manufacturers to stop using MSG in their prod-' "If give glutamate to animals, especially 4 young ones; 'it can destroy the nerve cells," he says. "But the Chinese Restaurant Snydrome probably happens in a different way from brain damage. Just what the mechanism is, we can't say with certainty." One clue to MSG reactions, he says, is that certain) reaches of the brain don't have protective barriers from toxic substances given off by the blood. "When you eat food with MSG in it, you're putting toxic, free amino acid in your system. We do know MSG is absorbed quickly in the intestinal lining.

If it enters the body as part of a protein, it's less harmful because the process is slower. It has to go through digestion, which takes some four hours to break it down into individual acids." THE IMMEDIATE response to MSG may occur because of its direct impact the system; hence, instant headaches, dizziness, palpitations, abdominal pains, chills, diarrhea, heartburn a whole Chinese cornucopia of minor illnesses. -But what exactly happens physiologically to the body when Chinese food fans eat beyond their limit of MSG isn't clear. even knows exactly why MSG enhances food flavor, though theories range from MSG'S increasing the sensitivity of the taste buds to its stimulating the formation of saliva. Just how much MSG will cause the syndrome isn't known either.

In one study, researchers reported it took two teaspoons of MSG in a six-ounce glass of tomato juice to produce symptoms of headache, dizziness, and Tall those other goodies associated with the Chinese Restaurant Syndrome. Two teaspoons was the dosage for females; males required twice the amount. Another study showed as little as a quarter of a teaspoon of MSG can cause the malady. But why this happens to 1 Continued on page 4 ost 'tourists come tack lrom France with ll II ft I couPie 01 bottles of peril I fume- somt brandy, and VLR an rt poster from the. Louvre.

Carl Sontheimer came home with three food processors. That was 197L By 1973, he was ready, to introduce his Cuisinart food processor at the Chicago Housewares Show. By 1979, he had sold more than a million of them, causing a revolution in. American cooking and making Cuisinart a word in upper-middle class households. He did not exactly mean for it to happen that way.

Sontheimer, a Robert Morley lookalike with a devilishly droll sense of humor, was interested In a little something to fill his spare time. He was supposed to be retired. The man who single-handedly has made blenders nearly obsolete already had enjoyed a healthy 20-year career of creating and operating electronic firms with such names as Trak, Anzac, and Tor. That was before he met his new destiny at a Paris housewares show. He is an electronic whiz might be the only person who went to MIT because it was the only school I could get who holds 44 patents and who has some of his inventions on the moon.

But in 1969, at the age of 55, he decided to pack it in and take life easy. "I figured I'd just relax and find some nice hobby. But after three months I said I've got to do something. Obviously, the coming field is home security I'll start a home security business." But burglar alarms didn't catch Son theimer's Babas au rhum did. COOKING HAS BEEN a hobby for 40 years, since his childhood in France, where his father was a representative for an American company.

So it was only fitting that Sontheimer give some cooking classes. But he proved to be such a klutz in the kitchen that Shirley, his wife of 12' years, had to pick up after him, and the' lessons were abandoned in favor of writing. As assistant food editor for a "nationally unknown newspaper" (the Westport Free Press) he wrote some esoteric articles: "A Good Cook Can Read a Recipe Like a Musician Can Read a and "In Defense of Twenty-Year-Old Recipes." He invented a recipe for cherry tomato barbecue sauce containing cherries and (His sense of humor is "Dry," Shirley calls it.) "I finally said to Shirley, 'Look, let's go to Europe and see a couple of trade shows. I know the French stainless steel cookware is much better than ours. We'll get the rights to sell one line to the whole U.S.A.

It will make our trips to France more frequent, and" I think we could develop a small mail order Sontheimer pauses, relishing the delightful understatement of the phrase' "small mail order business." He loves to talk and he's wonderful at it, peppering the tale of How the Cuisinart Came to Be with quotations from Thomas Jefferson, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Moliere, pausing before twists and turns in the plot, closing his eyes, -the better to savor the delicious ironies of life, fate, and food processors. "Cuisinart is the life of his love," says Shirley, who is also' his partner in Cuisinarts, which they began in 1971. He devotes seven-day weeks to it, 12-hour days, and spends what free time he has- i. i i i lj -I 1 Carl Sontheimer and his baby. He introduced the food processor to the United States and In the process, if you win excuse me piay, ne stanea a revolution in inn wuuu ui cooking (and got a little richer, too).

tries. They learn to process (in itself a new culinary term) ingredients in the correct' sequence so that a dish can be composed in the processor without having to empty the bowl. The accompanying chocolate mousse recipe, in which the chocolate is i chopped so fine that it does not have to be melted, shows how the processor can change cooking. The Cuisinart processor has entered the national consciousness to such an extent that it is hard to remember that only six years ago there was none. Four cartoons in the New Yorker have been based on it, including one that shows a distraught housewife on the phone to her friend, say-! ing something like, "I hope you and Harry- haven't had dinner yet.

I've had the most catastrophic Cuisinart overrun." Even a New York-interior decorators want to stock them. But the first time Sontheimer eyed1 the prototype of the machine to the machine today than we are to the missing the Paris Salon des Arts Mena-gers in 1971, he was not Impressed. "They have pitch men everywhere at the" Paris show, and we stopped at one stall where a company called Robot-Coupe was demonstrating a restaurant food proces- i Continued on page 2 order business" like a gourmand in the 'midst' of a lavish dinner who sees the' pastry, cart wheeled by. What happened is that the "small mail order business," headquartered in Greenwich, employs 160 people and can barely keep up w.ith demand. Stores throughout the country have run ads saying, "It's here!" when a shipment of Cuisinart food processors arrives.

The machine's popularity has spawned more than two dozen competitors and nearly 30 books of food processor recipes. i CLASSES IN HOW TO utilize the machines have become part of the curricula in cooking schools throughout the country. Newspapers and magazines devote columns and articles to processor cooking. And with the "prices of the machines dropping, a food processor in every home has become a middle-class possibility instead of just an upper-class indulgence. When properly used, the machine really is revolutionary.

Although most cooks use it initially merely to reduce the drudgery of slicing, chopping, mixing, the more perceptive and adventuresome quickly discover, with the help of classes or cookbooks, techniques that allow them to make things too difficult to bother with before: quenelles, mousses, pates, pas- cooking, reading cookbooks, and maybe some science fiction. It's hard to know where Cuisinarts leaves off and Sontheimer begins. "Every company has a personality who is a reflection of the top man. I can't separate myself from the company," he says. HE RELISHES HIS role as the eccentric scientist who tinkered with his machine for year and a half before he would "unleash it," as he says, on the' world.

He's a perfectionist who is constantly experimenting. "I don't think I've ever had pancakes fixed the same way twice or eggs," says who worked at the Hudson Institute, a think tank, before marrying Sontheimer. "Life with Carl is. always stimulating. He has such interesting things to say.

And he listens to other people. At heart I think he's a natural teacher. We have a real exchange of ideas. It's not a jogging kind of lifestyle we lead, but it's always Now he sits fingering his newest model in its naked box. never see a Cuisinart in a box with a four-color picture on it.

It would cost an extra 20 or 30 cents, and I can use that money on a slightly better He is looking forward to telling what happened to that "small mail A look, before it disappears, at tha classic way: 0rri-X)jiN9B By Mimi Sheraton fineness as the olives-. and later the oil are broken down. After the- olives, pits, and just a little water are crushed lthough olive oil is made and used in almost, every country that faces the Mediterranean" Sea, the world's most delicate and subtly elegant is produced in that sun-drenched flower A' it garden that is Provence in southern France. 1 Even here the making of olive oil is rapidly CI to a fine pulp, they are layered bn two round flats of nylon or cocofiber mats, which then are stacked on a spindle in layers nearly six feet high. A large metal disk is put on top and all is slid into a hydraulic press.

At first, only slim trickles of the tar-like oil ooze but as the press is raised and lowered several times and showers of hot water coax the oil out of the mash, the whole mechanism begins becoming the exclusive province of large fac 'v t-4 i tories and the ancient process often is rushed and made more profitable by the use of heat and chemicals and by the blending of various grades of olive oil with vegetable oils such as soy or sunflower. Small private mills that closely approximate the old methods are fast disappearing from the scene. Ten or 15 years ago there were 128 such mills in Menton alone; today there are only two, both owned by' members of the Lottier family. A visit to the mill of Francois Lottier is like -1 stepping into an old engraving. There, in a cool, dark, stone-and-concrete cave-like setting with Gothic arched windows, giant wood gears turn huge granite grindstones as some 450 pounds of tiny, ruby-black olives are crushed to pulp and reduced to thick, black 'oil in two-and-a-half hours.

Work starts early at such, mills during the pressing season from November through May, and when I arrived 6:15. a.m., the slim, wiry, and energetic Lottier and his two assistants had been at work for an hour, and a half. Lottier's full-time occupation is farming, ad If he is to" have time to tend his lemon, avocado, and fig trees, and his patches of flowers and vegetables, he must finish the olive oil pressing by 9 a m. The production of olive oil consists of. a series of crush-bigs, settlings, and separation, each done with increasing to rain ou.

The heavy, dark oil runs along a channel Into a centrifuge, where it is spun until the water and oil are separated. Then the oil is tunneled into wooden barrels. The midnight-dark oil at this stage tastes like liquid ripe-, olives, and the scent is age-old, sweet, and heady. After the -sediment settles for a few days, the oil becomes golden and is drawn off and placed in larger barrels, where it must settle and mellow for two months before it is siphoned off into bottles and sold to shops or, more likely, to local customers who come to the mills with their own bottles foi refills of this cold-pressed pure virgin olive oil. THE THIRD GENERATION of his ramlly to make oil in the mill that his grandfather built in 1870, Lottier thinks the world's best oils come from Lucca in Italy, Provence, and from regions of northern Spain.

Olive oil from other areas are not "douce" sweet and have a high acidity because of the type of olives and the temperature. Sweetness, or the lack of acidity, is the prize in olive oil, and that with the lowest acidity is considered an elixir for the stomach, to be taken daily by the spoonful. Lottier thinks olive oil is good 3- Pnow by Richwd KiyaMssium-Nm YoiK Tim Continued on page a Francois Lottier (right) and a helper take breakfast' by the olive press..