Delicious: A History of Monosodium Glutamate and Umami, the Fifth Taste Sensation

My dissertation examines two interrelated objects: the global commodity and flavour enhancer monosodium glutamate (MSG), and umami (roughly translated from the Japanese as “deliciousness”), the fifth basic taste that MSG is understood to confer. This project situates umami within transmutations of the life sciences between Japan and the United States, and shows how the metabolics of taste are inseparable from global capitalisms. My research demonstrates how the infusion of molecular technique into taste psychophysics, food technology, and emerging arenas like gastrophysics has provided a boon to corporate producers and commercial users of MSG, who have toiled since the 1970s to forge consensus around the scientific validity of umami taste and thus equate MSG—which crossed the Pacific as a food technology for improving troop morale after World War II—with ‘natural’ sources of umami. In the United States, MSG has been heavily coded as East Asian, despite the fact that it has been used pervasively in iconic Anglo-American food products (e.g. Campbell’s soup, flavoured chips)—and is even now bound up in the international branding of Japanese cuisine. I suggest that MSG’s implication in a ‘symptom complex’ (ranging from numbness and tingling to asthma and indigestion) may indicate that the additive’s metabolism by humans is less well understood than regulatory standards reflect—and that all umami tastants may not be metabolically equivalent. I argue that monosodium glutamate and similar umami-conferring additives not only help to make possible, they make palatable, the hegemony of ‘Big Food.’ MSG helps to make unhealthy, cheap foods taste good, and as such it illuminates the insidious appeal and potential spread of processed foods in an increasingly food-scarce world.Ph.D