How does the author use specific details to explain what umami is? Use information from the text to support your answer. Umami, the Fifth Taste

A potato chip’s sharp saltiness. A chocolate bar’s sweetness. The puckery sourness of a lemon. The bitterness of broccoli. Until recently, scientists agreed that these four were the only tastes our tongues detected, and that combinations of salty, sweet, sour, and bitter produced the complex flavors we enjoy in food.

But first, what is taste? We taste with our tongues, although our noses contribute to what the senses experience when we eat. We have trouble tasting when we have a cold. That’s because our noses are responsible for creating what we recognize as flavor. Taste expert Professor Tom Finger defines flavor as “a combination of taste and smell.” Professor Finger offers a simple experiment that illustrates the difference between taste and flavor: Chew a jellybean while holding your nose closed. Can you recognize the flavor? But open your nose and keep chewing. You should know exactly what you’re eating: cherry, strawberry, or watermelon.

Taste happens on our tongues. If you look at your tongue in a mirror, you’ll see that it is covered with tiny bumps called papillae. Inside the papillae are cells too small to see; these are called taste buds. After you eat a potato chip, and the saliva in your mouth has begun to break it down, the chip moves over some of your tongue’s thousands of papillae and reaches the taste buds. Chemical receptors1 in the buds that respond to salt then send a “salty” signal to your brain. Some people, called “supertasters,” have more papillae than others. Supertasters react strongly to the tastes in foods, especially those that are bitter.

The sides of our tongues are more sensitive than the middle, and the back is especially sensitive to bitterness. Scientists believe that this extra sensitivity helped to prevent early humans from swallowing poisonous or rotten foods.

Over a hundred years ago, a chemistry professor in Japan named Kikunae Ikeda believed there was a fifth taste to which our tongues reacted. This taste was not sweet, sour, bitter, or salty. It was different, rich, and distinct. Professor Ikeda enjoyed this taste in asparagus, tomatoes, cheese, meat, and especially in a savory Japanese seaweed broth called dashi. Professor Ikeda isolated the chemical that gave dashi its taste: glutamic acid. He named this

new, fifth taste “umami,” which means “delicious.”

It wasn’t until 2002 that the taste receptor for umami was located and the fifth taste was completely understood. But long before science confirmed it, people enjoyed the taste of umami-rich foods: soy sauce, mushrooms, ketchup, cooked meats (think cheeseburgers and

pepperoni pizzas), and Parmesan cheese. Scientists believe that humans came to enjoy the distinct umami taste because of our need to eat protein-rich foods.

Like its brother and sister tastes, umami is uniquely itself. Umami has a depth described as “mouthfulness.” Others have declared that umami is the taste of “yum” or “pure deliciousness.” However we explain the fifth taste, it’s hard to imagine a great meal that isn’t just a little bit umami.