David Chang wants to challenge some of the ways we think about food. Like, for example, the difference between what we consider "highbrow" and "lowbrow" cuisine. While there's a lot to savor in the world of food snobbery, as he told Stephen Colbert on Wednesday, there's a lot to love in "commercially available" food, like that Domino's thick crust you ordered at 2 A.M. last Saturday.

But that's only one of the food prejudices Chang has his eye on. The other is old fashioned racism, which worms its way into how we perceive the food we eat. Take for example monosodium glutamate, a much maligned ingredient in a lot of Chinese takeout. Chang calls it "vilified salt," and cites a recent story out of Florida, where a woman who didn't know she was pregnant mistook her labor pains for the after-effects of eating bad Chinese food.

"Someone fertilized her eggroll," Colbert replied, to a mix of laughs and groans, before asking, "So how is that racist?" Chang continued:

In the sense that it's almost always localized in Chinese food, Asian food, "Oh, I can't eat that because it's gonna make me feel ill. I'm not saying you can't be sensitive, but you can't be allergic to it because we need glutamic acid in our body to survive. It's most widely consumed, MSG, in junk food, but no one ever says they got ill from eating Doritos, right?

To drive the point home, Chang brings out a platter of hot dogs for him and Colbert, some with sauerkraut and some with kimchi. In principle, Chang says, the two condiments are the same thing: fermented cabbage. But kimchi, a Korean staple, has historically had a reputation in the U.S. of being too spicy, too pungent, and too weird. Incidentally, if Domino's tried out a kimchi pizza, we'd be down to try it.