On the 19th floor of an office building in Fort Lee, New Jersey, amid the maze of turnpikes and highways that greet New Yorkers upon exiting the George Washington Bridge, the full force of Ajinomoto's defense against decades of cultural bias is on display. I am met by Miro Smriga, who greets me with an endearingly halting East-meets-West accent — a product of his birthplace (Czechoslovakia) and where he's worked as a science and regulatory manager for Ajinomoto for much of his adult life (Tokyo) before moving to New Jersey two years ago. Smriga is the opposite of the lock-step PR robot I was expecting, but like all good public relations executions, I get the feeling that even this seemingly minor detail had been carefully considered.

As we sit down in a conference room, I am given a stack of published research papers by scientists around the world claiming MSG is safe to eat. Most of these papers were funded at least in part by Ajinomoto itself. I am handed a promotional pamphlet disguised as a book on dashi, umami, and Japanese food culture, printed on paper that is clearly very expensive. I am offered a glutamate-rich yet ethnically neutral chicken, tomato, mozzarella, and avocado sandwich.

As he begins his PowerPoint, Smriga speaks casually, and moves in and out of presentation mode with ease to address my questions, but his message remains focused: Despite MSG's bad name, science gives us no reason to believe that it is harmful. The first slide contains a chart of the five known tastes discernible by the human tongue: Bitter is caused by acetic acid, salty is sodium chloride, and sweet is sucrose, not sugar. And there is monosodium glutamate, responsible for umami. This is a reminder — most certainly a calculated one — that almost everything we eat has a scientific name just as artificial-sounding as "monosodium glutamate."

Smriga has clearly given this spiel before (including once to chef Heston Blumenthal, he says). It was born from a moment when his company was caught squarely on the defensive in response to Dr. Kwok's letter.

"Before the accident, Ajinomoto was a science company, but all the science was based in production," Smriga tells me, his word choice ("accident") revealing how unexpected the MSG backlash had been. "But now we are a company based on broad science. We have nutritionists, pharmacologists, doctors of all kinds — more scientists by percentage than any other company."

But by the time Ajinomoto joined other MSG producers and food companies like Nestlé and Unilever to form the Glutamate Association in 1977 — a trade group to fund scientific research and lobby regulators in Washington, D.C. — the damage had already been done. "The company made a mistake because they didn't do anything," Smriga says, referring to the years immediately following Dr. Kwok's letter. "The mistake was huge, and we paid for it."

And they're still paying. Search for "MSG and autism," "MSG and obesity," or "MSG and seizures," and the top results belong to msgtruth.org, a website devoted to perceived health risks presented by both MSG and aspartame. It is the work of Carol Hoernlein, a New Jersey woman who spent four years working for food companies before becoming disillusioned with their practices and quitting in 1992. Hoernlein has battled high blood pressure for most of her life due to a series of serious kidney problems, and would often suffer blood pressure spikes, headaches, and stomach problems after eating. When she removed MSG from her diet after a relative told her she believed Ac'cent had caused her uncle's heart attack, she says her symptoms reduced dramatically. Her site links MSG consumption with not just the standard "Chinese restaurant syndrome" symptoms but also depression, seizures, diabetes, autism, multiple sclerosis, and seemingly every other conceivable health problem in an elaborate flowchart.

"I'm a scientist — I can't just assume something, I have to check it out," she tells me, describing her motivation to create the site in 2002. Hoernlein clearly has an understanding of food science, but she also has a tendency to oversimplify the conclusions of research, and to connect dots that aren't there. Both on her site and in our conversation, Hoernlein frequently cites the studies by Olney and others that have associated glutamic acid with obesity, brain and retina lesions in infant mice, using them as evidence that MSG could do the same thing to humans. Yet she does not mention that no such symptoms have been reproduced consistently in primates, let alone humans, and that the lesions were induced from extremely high doses of injected MSG.

When I ask her about this disparity, she deflects my question toward her desire for more thorough, independent research, which she sees as her site's main purpose, despite its alarmist tone. She is certainly correct in pointing out that research funded by a company with a massive financial stake in its outcome presents a problem, and can make hacking through the literature for a clear signal difficult.

But Wang, the Princeton neuroscientist, dismisses conflict of interest as a strong enough force to significantly steer the research process into MSG worldwide. A trade group like the Glutamate Association, even though it might be footing the bill for individual papers, is "not in a position to send tentacles into the entire scientific establishment and bend all our minds to its will," he says. "Whoever could demonstrate an actual biological effect of MSG on behavior, mood, or the brain would make his or her mark on science forever. And every scientist wants to make a lasting mark."

Hoernlein tells me most of the people who email her with stories of their health improving after avoiding MSG have a history of other medical problems, as she does. When I ask her which foods she has to avoid to control her exposure to MSG and her blood pressure, her list includes canned soups, Caesar dressing, sausage, "anything Parmesan encrusted," soy sauce, and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Science is never going to prove definitively to someone suffering from high blood pressure that eliminating these foods won't make them feel better. But it's also not going to conclude that MSG is to blame more than any of the other ingredients with proven negative health effects those foods have in common. Nothing we eat is risk-free, and so the language of food safety regulations speaks of "acceptable levels of risk" or "the reasonable certainty" that foods won't harm us, not of absolutes. Science is the same; to assume that published research can account for every individual's differences, every perceived "canary in the coal mine" as Hoernlein likes to say, is to confuse scientific research with personal health care. Another instance of the MSG meme's power — its cultural currency is not proportional to its truth.