Chef Woody reviews the five (yes five) basic flavors the mouth recognizes: bitter, sweet, sour, salty, and umami, which can be translated as savory. Umami is the flavor in MSG. Chef Woody explained that Japanese scientists have shown that there are taste receptors for umami on the human tongue, but that Westerns tastes have mainly ignored the flavor, so we just don't realize it is there. The slide on the right illustrates one of the many taste receptors that make up a taste bud, which is shaped like a moat around an island. The "moat" allows the food molecules in the saliva to spread over the taste receptors, each of which lives for about a week, after which time a cell next to the receptor moves over to become the new receptor.
