Select: a matter of taste

After binge-watching the first season in a week, I'm being very measured in my approach to watching season two of Chef's Table on Netflix, rationing the episodes to one a week. Last week, I devoured episode one, which features Grant Achatz of three Michelin-starred restaurant Alinea in Chicago. Towards the end of this episode, Achatz shares his experience of being diagnosed with cancer just as Alinea was beginning to boom. He talks about how, while undergoing chemotherapy treatment, he lost his sense of taste. It got me thinking about taste, and how easy it is to take its complexity for granted.

Taste, otherwise known as “gustatory perception”, manifests itself through a chemical reaction between the taste buds that line our tongues and the food or substances that they encounter, distinguishing between sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami.

Though all the taste senses have an intricate combination of benefits and drawbacks, I find the fifth sense of umami to be the most engaging. It’s the taste of savouriness, or a “meaty” taste that appears in non-meat ingredients such as mushrooms, cheese and soy sauce, or fermented foods such as gochujang and miso.

Umami, which is the gift of the chemical glutamate, has only been recognised in Western science as a fifth taste in the past 50 years, but the flavour of umami has been with us for aeons, through fermented fish sauces of ancient Rome and soy sauce in third century China.

It was Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda who first scientifically identified umami in 1908, when he discovered that glutamate was behind the yumminess of kombu seaweed. He perceived that the taste of a kombu dashi was distinct from sweet, sour, bitter and salty, and he named this taste “umami” which translates as “good flavour”, “good taste”, or “scrumptiousness”.

The French lawyer and food writer Jean Anthelme Brillat- Savarin, who believed that the discovery of a new dish brought more happiness to humans than the discovery of a new star, seemed to have an inherent appreciation for the wonders of umami. In his most famous book, The Physiology of Taste, first published in 1825, he wrote, "Dessert without cheese is like a beauty with only one eye." More recently, Amy Fleming of The Guardian's Word of Mouth food blog wrote a case for the importance of umami.

Apart from its deliciousness, Fleming argues, it’s also a signifier for nutrition. “Just as humans evolved to crave sweetness for sugars and, therefore, calories and energy, and loathe bitter to help avoid toxins, umami is a marker of protein which is made up of amino acids, which are essential for life.”

Many scientists believe that food preference is evolutionary and has developed to protect us. American academic and food psychologist Paul Rozin, who coined the term the “omnivore’s dilemma”, studied the phenomenon of disgust and the part it plays in our food choices. It is not a stretch to link our reaction of disgust towards specific food to self-preservation. We are repulsed by rotten food and so we don’t eat it, which in turn keeps us safe from tummy aches.

Bigthink.com refer to taste as both a sense and a preference. Columbia University neurologist, Professor Stuart Firestein, distinguishes taste from flavour arguaing that flavour is more in the olfactory (smell) realm than in the taste realm. While taste is the straightforward facts of sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami, flavour is more about choice and preference. In a video outlining the connection between taste, smell and memory, Firestein points out that these memories are often emotional as opposed to practical.

In his seven volume novel Rememberance of Things Past, otherwise known as In Search of Lost Time, published between 1913 and 1927, Marcel Proust famously wrote about the memories locked within a cup of lime-flower tea and the crumbs of a madeleine cake. He describes at great length the experience of being brought back to Sunday mornings in his aunt Léonie's Combray house, simply by tasting a madeleine dipped in lime tea. It was only the taste, and not the sight of the cake, that brought the memory of his aunt dipping her madeleine into her tea and sharing it with a young Proust, and how "immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre… all from my cup of tea."

As Proust poetically put it: “the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”

Taste really is a powerful thing.