This year, I turn 49.
Everyone loves to remind me that I’m almost 50.
And oh my, isn’t that soooo old?
Sure. It’s old. I guess. Age is just a number.
Am I right?
I’m not bitter.
Speaking of bitter, let’s take a little detour and talk about food for a minute. (I LOVE talking about food!)
Do you remember learning about the four core flavors our tongues can detect: salty, sweet, sour, and yes, that bitter one? If my memory serves me correctly, we had a ditto printout of a tongue and it was mapped to show where all those taste receptors reside.
Taste Map of the Tongue
That was 1987.
That taste map has since been debunked, and in recent years, there’s been talk of a fifth flavor.
You may have heard of it.
It’s called UMAMI.
Brief history.
In 1908, a scientist by the name of Kikunae Ikeda discovered a peculiar, but subtle taste present in foods such as tomatoes, asparagus, meat, and cheese. He recognized this additional taste quality as something quite different from the usual salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. I’ll spare you the boring details, but after a long chemical process, Ikedo isolated and identified glutamic acid as that fifth unique taste. And he named it UMAMI.
Umami provides balance, increases cravings, elevates the other flavors present in a dish, and in the right proportion, provides great pleasure.
Ruth Reichl (the food critic for the New York Times from 1993-1999), once described umami as “what something is when it is exactly right for the moment.”
What Something Is When It Is Exactly Right for the Moment
Believe it or not, the International Symposium on Glutamate didn’t recognize umami as a distinct fifth taste until 1990, nearly 100 years after it was first discovered.
Coincidentally, 1990 was the year I met my now-husband. Exactly right? You bet!
And I’ll tell you, it’s taken me a long time to get here, but finally I can say that where I am right now is also exactly right for this moment.
In fact, all the moments I’ve experienced up until right now have been exactly right.
Even when those moments didn’t seem like they were exactly right.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
UMAMI in LIFE
Life is full of flavor.
Years before I got pregnant with our first daughter, Gavin and I talked about having kids…someday. But we kept waiting for the right time.
“Everything must be exactly right,” we told ourselves.
“We have to finish graduate school. “
“We need to get out of this apartment. “
“Raising a family costs money.”
Then when we unexpectedly found out that we were pregnant, none of those things had yet come true.
And guess what?
That little baby was exactly right for that exact moment in time.
Of course, back then no one would have described what was happening in our lives as umami.
That’s because the word umami is used almost exclusively to describe food. In Japanese, umami literally means “essence of deliciousness.”
But just for fun, let’s keep the metaphor going.
A “delicious“ turn of events had just taken place in our young lives!
Something unique was happening. We loved being parents. Our new daughter brought out the best in us. Because of her, we added three more children to the mix. And all of them provide us with great pleasure.
Maybe umami isn’t a flavor at all, but a state of being.
Of being exactly right for the moment we’re in.
Exactly right, right where we are.
I’ve found that as I’ve gotten older I want to savor more of every moment. And yes, that includes even the hard ones.
We talk about the “sweet” seasons of our lives, seasons filled with first the joy of first love. We lament the “bitterness” of disappointment—an unbearable diagnosis or the heartbreaking loss of a loved one. Everyone knows what it means to feel “soured” by circumstances that don’t work out quite the way we want. And who hasn’t been miffed by a “salty” comment directed our way?
But in every season and every circumstance, a layer of complexity resides. No wonder it took decades to locate the taste buds that detect umami (the year 2006 to be exact). Things don’t always feel exactly right, right when we’re experiencing them.
Time is a thief. And time is our friend.
In time, our lives are softened by memories, shaped by perspective, and forged by wisdom.
I bet you, too, have a story of something that turned out to be exactly right for the moment, even though it probably didn’t seem that way at the time. These “umami” moments are the spice of life.
The right spice in the right amount leaves us feeling satisfied and full.
That’s umami.
Take that, 49!
And I am grateful.