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The Fifth Taste Needs A New Name By John Birdsall From the Winter 2005 edition of Dish It’s an old quip that never stops amusing us: To say that something – whether it’s tofu, rattlesnake or a finger in a bowl of chili – tastes just like chicken. But what does chicken taste like? Can you say, exactly? As a restaurant critic, I know that the taste of meat is among the hardest things to write about, as tricky as describing melody: Words just aren’t adequate. In a restaurant review, I once described the taste of chicken in a Thai dish as “sweet” and “sapid.” Now, “sweet” is about as vague as it gets, a word that applies, with thoroughly different connotations, to everything from red bell peppers and mint leaves to coconut ice cream and the waiter’s demeanor. “Sapid” is a cheat: Technically, it means merely “flavorful,” but it’s a word I dust off whenever I’m faced with conveying the indescribably juicy, protein-rich, vaguely bloody-tasting flavor of meat. But really – as it stands now, sapid is about as vague a word as you can imagine. The truth is, as users of English we have a pitifully scant collection of words to describe what things taste like. And the words we do have – “sweet,” “sour, “salty,” and “bitter” – are as worn and inadequate as a pair of old oven mitts. Since food writers first began using the word more than a decade ago, “umami” promised a revolution in how we think about taste. Actually, the concept of umami is a hundred years old, the discovery of a Japanese chemist, Kikunae Ikeda, studying seaweed In 1908, Ikeda declared that kombu, long the basis of Japanese soup stocks, contains amino acids that impart a distinctive taste. Ikeda isolated the particular round, full, meaty taste that falls outside the broad categories of sweet, sour, salty and bitter and called it “umami.” Harold McGee, the Bay Area author who explores food chemistry, suggests the word means “delicious” in Japanese. But Michael Quinion, who writes for a Web site called Weird Words (www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords), says the word is more complex, peppering “delicious” with suggestions of “pungent,” meaty,” and “savory.” And something else: “It’s sometimes associated with a feeling of perfect quality in a taste, or of some special emotional circumstance in which a taste is experienced. It is also said to involve all the sense, not just that of taste. There’s more than a suggestion of a spiritual or mystical quality about the word.” For many of us, a fifth category of taste (especially one with mystical implications) seems as strange as the practice of communal bathing. But Ikeda’s discovery led to the kind of commercial success any of us would envy: He isolated the amino acids – the bloom of fine, powdery crystals that cover dried kombu seaweed – and named them monosodium glutamate, MSG. In 2001, UC San Diego biologist Chares Zuker proved that umami is real:We really do have taste buds that perceive a unique flavor component in MSG, taste buds very different from ones that register sweetness, saltiness, sourness or bitterness. And though scientists have proven that MSG
poisoning has about as much factual potency as Internet spam messages
touting pills for male anatomy enhancement, most of us still want to
avoid it. But umami is enjoying ever-widening currency, thanks to
writers and teachers in culinary academies trying to talk with precision
about meats, soy sauce, mushrooms and aged cheese such as parmesan.
That’s an admirable goal. But there’s something about umami – whether
it’s the funny-sounding word itself, or the still novel concept of a
fifth taste – that hasn’t quite clicked with food writers, much less the
general public.
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