Is Umami a Taste?

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Taste is just really hard to study, in large part because taste is so incredibly difficult to isolate. A lot of what we think we're tasting is actually a smelling food from inside our mouths. And even when you take the nose out of the equation entirely and just focus on sensing chemicals in the mouth, the borders of taste are still fuzzy. But by the nineties, researchers were pretty sure that umami wasn't an aroma or a touch, though it did have an interesting mouth feel. The human genome project was a multi billion dollar international collaboration to map out all the billions of d na base pairs in the human genuThe thought was that this would unlock the blueprints for understanding

For thousands of years, there have been four basic tastes recognized across cultures. But thanks to Kumiko Ninomiya (aka the Umami Mama), scientists finally accepted a fifth. As part of its Making Sense series, Vox’s Unexplainable podcast explores whether there could be even more.

This episode was reported and produced by Meradith Hoddinott and edited by Katherine Wells, Noam Hassenfeld, Brian Resnick with help from Mandy Nyugen and Byrd Pinkerton. Music by Noam. Cristian Ayala handled the mixing and sound design. Research and fact checking by Richard Sima. Tori Dominguez is our audio fellow.

Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained

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