Umami: The World's Cleverest Marketing Scheme

What's umami?

It's a flavor variously described as savory and satisfying and rich. Foodies and scientists alike are calling it the "fifth taste," an official category of flavor recognized by specialized taste receptors in the human mouth. (The other four are sweet, salty, bitter and sour.) Umami became a very trendy word and concept in the West a few years ago, spawning oodles of blog posts and entire websites based on it, not to mention restaurants named after it. Umami Burger has four locations in Los Angeles.

Researching this topic for an article recently, I had my doubts. If umami is such a fundamental flavor, I wondered, then why the heck hadn't most Americans so much as heard the word five years ago? (Many, I've learned since then, still haven't.)

Umami is a Japanese word, but not an ancient one. It never appears in the haiku of Basho. It was coined in 1909 by Tokyo Imperial University chemistry professor Kikunae Ikeda after he performed experiments to see why he so enjoyed seaweed broth. Identifying the source of his pleasure as glutamic acid, an amino acid produced by the human body and present in many foods -- soy sauce, cured ham, Parmesan cheese -- Ikeda invented a revolutionary process for isolating crystalline monosodium glutamate. Ikeda patented this process and, with a partner, promptly began manufacturing the "flavor enhancer" MSG under the brand name Ajinomoto.

Umami was not discussed among the samurai or in the haiku of Basho. It was invented by the same person who invented MSG.

Ajinomoto funds many of the scientific studies investigating specialized umami-taste receptors in the mouth.

Hailed as a genuine glorious source of human pleasure, umami is actually an infinitely clever marketing scheme.

Retired hospital administrator Jack Samuels launched the Truth in Labeling campaign in 1994, after being diagnosed as hypersensitive to MSG. (The Mayo Clinic points out that no direct connection has ever been found between MSG consumption and so-called "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome," whose symptoms include numbness, headaches and seizures. Degree of severity varies; some people have no reaction to MSG at all.) Samuels tirelessly confronts food-safety agencies and scolds members of the press for publishing what he calls "glutamate-industry propaganda dressed up" as feature stories and news reports. At TruthinLabeling.org, he proffers an endless stream of statistics and studies linking MSG with obesity, migraines, asthma, brain damage, seizures, heart irregularities, lesions in the hypothalamus, and other horrors.

"Every time someone has a finding that shows MSG is dangerous, the glutamate industry has a study funded to show that the first study is wrong. They draw upon their stable of cooperating scientists and fund them to do another study which may very well have been designed or written by the glutamate industry. They're very good at recruiting scientists from highly regarded universities. ... These aren't really studies," seethes Samuels. "MSG kills brain cells."

But umami from other sources is the mind's way of healing the body, theorizes Tsinghua University psychology professor Seth Roberts, author of the bestselling book The Shangri-La Diet. Roberts' "Umami Hypothesis" holds that our bodies naturally crave this flavor in order to trick us into eating bacteria.

"We like certain foods -- foods that taste sour, umami, or have a complex flavor -- so that we will eat plenty of bacteria," Roberts told me. "We don't crave the bacteria; we like those three flavors. Long ago, when we evolved, those three flavors were good signs that the food had a lot of bacteria. Food that was more sour had more bacteria than food that was less sour, for example, because bacteria converted sugars to acids, and acids taste sour.

"The umami hypothesis is that we need regular immune stimulation to be in optimal health and long ago, when we evolved, we got that stimulation from bacteria in our food," says Roberts, who used to teach at UC Berkeley. "Bacteria in food was so important for health that we evolved three different food preferences -- for sour, complex, and umami flavors -- to make sure we got enough of it." Now as ever, he says, "bacteria-laden food is the natural way to stimulate the immune system."

Linking MSG with nightmares and other health problems, Roberts is anti-MSG. He recommends slaking the umami craving with cured ham and other foods in which glutamate occurs naturally.

"Long before MSG, cooks did things that increased the umami of their food. MSG is an excitotoxin. ... To get umami via MSG is no help and perhaps harmful. Our liking for umami is a sign that we should eat plenty of fermented food, not a sign that we need MSG."