Paper short abstract:

Among foodies, participation in umami as a hedonic and technical metric of food quality (like texture, lubricity, mouthfeel), has occluded critical discussion of glutamate’s central role in governing more complex processes like mood, satiety, and energy homeostasis.

Paper long abstract:

The early years of the twenty-first century have witnessed a softening of attitudes in the United States toward the long-vilified flavour enhancer monosodium glutamate (MSG). Contemporaneous with the popularization of avant garde cuisine and the infusion of molecular technique into food technology and taste psychophysics, the English-language scientific community has embraced the taste sensation umami (translated as "deliciousness") that Japanese scientists have long argued is conferred by MSG (Ikeda, 1909; Chaudhari, et al., 2000). I trace how, for a growing foodie set, participation in umami as experience, and as a technical metric of food quality (like texture, lubricity, mouthfeel), has occluded critical discussion of ongoing research into glutamate's central role in governing, for example, mood, satiety, and energy homeostasis (Ka He, 2011; Mouritsen, 2012).

Umami has given MSG producers, such as world leader Ajinomoto Co., Inc., a scientific rationale for equating MSG and other umami-conferring additives with foods otherwise high in umami-tasting glutamate (e.g. tomatoes, mushrooms, aged cheeses, cured meats, fermented condiments). I argue that MSG is not natural, but is a technology and a kind of biocapital (Rajan 2006). This project has demanded that I historicise the shifting scientific consensus on how flavour operates in the human body. For example, I trace how MSG and umami have for their entire history been bound up in the international branding of Japanese cuisine, and have sustained the myths of Japanese culinary exceptionalism and racially-specific taste acuity (Sand 2005; Petrick 2015).