Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Malcom Gladwell released a book that is a collection of
articles from his tenure at the magazine, The New Yorker. The articles are
generally very interesting and Gladwell’s habit of dissecting seemingly random, though influential people/ideas, is aptly represented in the collection. In one
article he talks about the evolution(or lack of) of ketchup. He describes the
science behind the ingredients of ketchup and mentions a few interesting facts.
There are five known
fundamental tastes in the human palate: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami.
Umami* is the proteiny, full-bodied taste of chicken soup, or cured meat, or
fish stock, or aged cheese, or mother’s milk, or soy sauce…
*MSG (an amino-acid
salt that is pure umami),
Small children tend to
be neophobic: once they hit two or three, they shrink from new tastes. That
makes sense, evolutionarily, because through much of human history that is the
age at which children would have first begun to gather and forage for
themselves, and those who strayed from what was known and trusted would never
have survived.
I think that most people would be able to name four of the
five tastes but umami may be absent from the common persons lexicon. I’m sure
we would all agree that the taste of meet was a unique and desirable taste but
I’m not sure they taught this when I was in elementary school.
It’s also interesting to look at children’s reduced
preference for a variety of food tastes after two or three. This really makes a
lot of sense to me as I’ve lived all over the world and some countries local
food is almost repugnant to me but the locals lap it up. It seems to be
whatever you are raised on and I’ve certainly seen this reflected in the
cuisine of various cultures (Nigerian’s preference for palm oil and Spanish
preference for olive oil)
No comments:
Post a Comment