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Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones. If you're

expecting to hear Dominic West reading Patrick Lee Furmer's piece on the Mani Olive Harvest,

and don't worry that will be out next week. This time, I'm talking to my colleague

Daniel Saw, a senior editor at the LRB, who has a piece in the current issue of the paper on the so-called

sixth taste, Kokumi. And it's possible that olive oil may get a mention this week, too. So before we get

to the sixth taste, or in order to get to the sixth taste, I think we need to be told

the story of the fifth taste, umami, and how that came to be added to the four that I learned

about in primary school, sweet, sour, salt and bitter. So everyone, I think, will have heard of

umami, which started circulating as a big and exciting thing.

Early this century, really, around 2010, you pick up any cookbook, you'll read about

umami, that savoury, rich taste that makes food have body.

You get it from rich mushrooms, from tomatoes, from parmesan cheese,

which turns out to be the most umami rich food on the planet.

We all like it.

It's the taste beyond salt, sweet, bitter and sour.

And what we probably don't always know is what a long history it has

because it didn't surface until fairly recently.

It began in 1908 when a chemist at Tokyo University called Ikeda had the lucky opportunity to travel to Germany to study at the best biochemistry department there.

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