Do We Really Have a 5th Taste? What Is the Umami Fad All About?

Wait, so our species has been eating for five million years, and it took this long for us to notice a fifth taste? Zuker and his colleagues have identified taste receptors that respond specifically to the other four -- sweet, salty, bitter, sour -- and now apparently to umami too. But who's to say another four or fourteen or four hundred tastes aren't lurking somewhere in the flavor spectrum waiting to be singled out, assigned clever names, and funneled into fads or industries or both? Might spicy-hot, gingery and creamy be the sixth, seventh, and eighth tastes? What if some flavor crucial only to the cuisine of Australian Aboriginals or Tanzanian Bantus is the long-awaited ninth? Who gets to choose?

Umami is the world's most successful marketing scheme.