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IF YOU don’t understand the appeal of Chinese food, maybe you’re not
experiencing the whole taste of it. Most people can taste all the basic flavours
of salty, sweet, bitter, sour and umami—the taste of monosodium glutamate
that is found in a lot of Far Eastern cooking. But researchers at the Laboratory
of Sensory Neurobiology in Paris have found that some people’s genetic make-up
gives them a defect in their taste receptors for umami (Chemical Senses, vol 27,
p 105). “There are many people who can’t taste glutamate and don’t know. They
just think it tastes salty,” says…