What is umami?

pop & funanalysisThe Conversation: Food1908 · Japan

What is umami?

the gist

Umami is the fifth basic taste, alongside sweet, sour, salty and bitter, and it is the savoury, meaty, brothy flavour. It comes mainly from glutamate, a form of the amino acid glutamic acid. Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda identified it in 1908 while studying kombu seaweed, and it was accepted as a basic taste in the early 2000s after researchers found dedicated receptors for it on the tongue. Umami has a synergy effect: glutamate tastes far stronger when paired with compounds such as the inosinates in dried bonito. That is why dashi, aged cheese, mushrooms and cured meats all taste so savoury.

so what

Umami explains why many traditional dishes taste satisfying without much salt or fat, and it shaped how Japanese cooks and food scientists think about flavour. Western cooks often reach for soy sauce or Parmesan to get the same effect without naming it.

D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909)

the gist

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.

how it works

To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.

so what

A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.

the bigger pattern

Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.

fun fact

In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.

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