Re: [CH] News item
george dork (gdork@flash.net)
Tue, 25 Apr 2000 22:44:04 -0500
Mary & Riley wrote:
>
> > From: Dave Drum [mailto:xrated@famvid.com]
> > Sent: Tuesday, April 25, 2000 5:43 PM
> > To: Mary & Riley
> > Cc: ChileHeads
> > Subject: Re: [CH] News item
>
> > Hmmmmmm..... I'll have to cross this into the FIDO Cooking Echo. We've
> > been discussing "hot" as a taste to go along with salt, sour, sweet and
> > bitter.
(snip)
This "news" about the umami taste is right 'bout a
hundred years old, as Mary and Riley noted.
In 1908 the Japanese investigator Kikunae Ikeda
isolated monosodium glutomate in the seaweed in which
it naturally occurs, permitting MSG to be produced
artifically.
The news more recently mentioned as being in the April
issue of Scientific American (I couldn't find it in
the on-line edition) is probably something along the
lines of a Reuters press report that can be viewed at
the URL below:
http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/Tastereceptor_000124.html
The gist of which is simply that the molecule in our
mouth that senses MSG has been identified.
Interestingly, the scientists who made this discovery
used rats as proxies for us...standing in for you and
me.
I will close now to go and ponder that, but I doubt it
is the chile sensor. dork