Umami Has Won Acceptance as a Distinct Taste

The concept of umami is much broader than the taste of glutamate. Ikeda was well aware of this, and he had noted that the taste of pure MSG was different from that of the naturally occurring umami that was a feature of Japanese dashi. Just the same, MSG proved to be the key to identifying umami as a true basic taste in the sensory-physiological sense. But the work progressed slowly, partly because it proved to be difficult to use animal models for gustatory experiments. Different species, and even subspecies (for example, different types of mice), do not respond uniformly to the substances that bring out umami.