I’m pretty sure you hit the nail on the head with your last point. We all saw it when avoiding gluten became a fad. Very few people had the need to avoid gluten, but enough for it to be added to some packaging. That steamrolled in to people thinking that gluten was somehow bad for them, regardless of the fact that if they had celiac disease they would have known about it.

My friend and I had a competition to point out the most ridiculous gluten free indicated packaging. I won with sand.

There were certainly other factors in play (and in this case, nobody needs to avoid msg) but once you sees the thought in people’s mind that something should be avoided, they’ll come up with all sorts of reasons on their own.

>However, my local Hippy Organic Community Grocery Store has all sorts of products proudly claiming the absence of MSG.

I wonder if they label tomatoes with that? if so they are falsely advertising as it naturally occurs in tomato.

It usually says “No MSG added”