The essence of taste

Commonly, we acknowledge five flavours: bitterness, saltiness, sourness, sweetness, and savouriness. When I grew up there were only four but we have finally caught up with the Japanese by acknowledging their umami.

Umami, as we all know by now, is the meaty, brothy taste found in good stocks, mushrooms, seafood and indeed cheese and tomatoes. The reaction on the tongue that fires up the umami flavour receptors is triggered by salts of glutamic acid in the food. So, to give some food a bit more of this tasty flavour you just need to find a pure source of these glutamates and sprinkle it on.

This is exactly the same as happens with the salty flavour: the saltiness receptors on the tongue are triggered by sodium ions so we find the purest source of these ions — sodium chloride — and sprinkle it on our chips. Yum!

And indeed with the sweet flavour: add sucrose.

The pure source of glutamates that provide the savoury flavour is monosodium glutamate — MSG. This is a white crystalline powder first isolated by a professor of chemistry in Japan in 1908. Today it is produced by the bacterial fermentation of sugar beet or cane sugar (yoghurt, just so we're on the same page, is produced by the bacterial fermentation of milk).

This compound is under deep suspicion: restaurants advertise that they don't use MSG; everybody checks the labels of things they pick up in the supermarket and if it has “flavour enhancer 621” we put it back on the shelf; when I was in Shanghai we went to restaurants that had little bowls of powdered MSG on the table as a condiment, I certainly didn't go near them.

This suspicion started in the late sixties when reports started coming in of some people suffering a collection of symptoms like headaches, numbness in the arms, facial pressure or flushing suffered in the hours after eating at Chinese restaurants. These symptoms would fade after a short time with no other effects. MSG was used generously in these restaurants and was then named as the culprit.

In the forty-odd years since, MSG has been one of the most studied food additives and yet researchers have been unable to demonstrate a link between MSG and these symptoms.

“Although the prevalence of CRS [Chinese Restaurant Syndrome] has been estimated to be 1–2% of the general population it is not clear what proportion of the reactions, if any, can be attributed to MSG. The vast majority of reports of CRS are anecdotal, and are not linked to the actual glutamate content of the food consumed. Furthermore, when individuals with a suspected sensitivity to MSG are tested in double-blind challenges the majority do not react to MSG under the conditions of the study […]. Many individuals may therefore incorrectly be ascribing various symptoms to MSG, when in fact some other food component may be the cause.”

 — FSANZ. Monosodium glutamate — a safety assessment, June 2003

So between one in every fifty and one in every hundred people sometimes suffer somewhat uncomfortable sensations after eating Chinese food when it has MSG in it and then they get better. And sometimes they don't suffer them. Particularly when they're taking part in a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. And the cause of these symptoms may not be MSG. These symptoms would certainly be unpleasant and, if they prefer, then these people should certainly avoid food with MSG added if they believe it's responsible but I didn't know that this was what all the fuss was about.

There is a world-view in this country that MSG must be avoided at all costs. It is a dangerous additive in any dose. It is a world-view that appears to me now to be hysteria far beyond what the dangers involve. Salt has been shown to have a long-term effect on blood pressure and people are aware of this danger and in general wouldn't put huge doses of salt on a dish as a result but there is no horror at the very name of it, no restaurants saying they don't cook with salt. MSG has never been shown to have a long-term effect on anything. The dangers of MSG so far have been shown to be that it may or may not cause 1–2% of the population to feel a little uncomfortable.

So, then, why all the fear? The common belief in Australia, as far as I know, is that “MSG is bad for you” but why is that what everybody believes? Memes get national acceptance when they are easy to believe and there are two things about MSG that make it frightening: first that it is used by Chinese people and Chinese people are foreign and foreign things are unfamiliar and therefore frightening; second is the name. It doesn't have a familiar, homey name like “salt” or “sugar” but goes only by the name of the chemical compound and that sounds artificial and therefore dangerous.

While it is easy to say “Oh yes, Harpo. I know that the names of things is not the thing itself. I know that the map is not the territory” but the truth is that, despite how evolved you think you are, you are still influenced in your attitude to a thing by what it is called. You can't help yourself. You are aware that the “surge” in Iraq was the same as an “escalation” but your reaction was, nevertheless, affected. The names of things matter more than you are willing to admit to yourself.

If sodium chloride (a substance that is precisely as much a chemical compound as monosodium glutamate) can hide behind the friendly, familiar word “salt” then monosodium glutamate ought to have its own street name. If the Japanese can coin their Japanese-sounding “umami” for the name of the flavour and have us all use it then I am going to coin the Australian-sounding “mate” for the name of the compound and will use it to refer to MSG in the future.

Food tastes delicious with a good veal stock but if you haven't time to make one then a sprinkle of mate gets you well on your way to a scrumptious dinner. If the fears of Australians — particularly the 98% of them who suffer no symptoms whatsoever — make it hard to find then I will just have to look harder for it.

• Journal of Nutrition
• British Journal of Medicine
• Food Standards Australia New Zealand
• World Health Organisation

  ¶ 11:40 am 3 comments

  Harpo starts saving the world Passing lightly over that bit where I didn't write anything for nine months, I want to take this opportunity to make a difference to the world. I want to give a little back, to make my mark, to make the world a better, greater place.

The first step in bringing about change, I understand, is to acknowledge what is wrong and, ladies and gentlemen, this is where I come into my own. Criticism. Oh yeah.

To start this project of bringing about world peace, I present, in chronological order, Harpo's Top Ten of history's greatest mistakes.

1. Emperor Honorius executing his general Stilicho leading to the Sack of Rome in 410
2. The destruction of the library at Alexandria
3. The British losing their American colony through overtaxing
4. That thing where we chopped all the trees down
5. Napoleon's invasion of Russia
6. Hitler's invasion of Russia
7. Basically anybody trying to invade Russia, it seems
8. Iraq
9. Facebook letting people use verbs other than ‘is’ in their status update
10. Again with the trees. Chopping down trees isn't working out well

So there we have it. All we have to do learn from these mistakes, because — as we know — those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.

…next semester.

  ¶ 7:15 pm 8 comments

  Connections I have fond memories of watching a music video when I was a lad of some old-timey diva-ish kind of jazz bar song with this funny animated video and a magnificent piano solo in the middle. What struck me particularly at the time was that the video showed the innards of a piano — the actual hammers hitting the actual strings — as the solo was being played.

This song was ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’ by Nina Simone. She had recorded the song back in 1958 but the video was from 1987: the single had been re-released after the track was used in a TV ad or something.

Whenever I hear the song I am struck by that great piano solo and I've long wanted to know more about the session musician they roped in to play it. I would have thought some faceless dude — who would have been paid a quick $15 to play on a timeless recording we're still listening to half a century later — deserved some fame. But the cool thing is — and I learned this only a couple of days ago — it was Simone herself who played it!

It turns out that her dream was to be the first black concert pianist and she only took up singing to continue to pay for her piano lessons. That's fabulous.

In 1966 she recorded ‘Lilac Wine’ which is, of course, a song now associated with Jeff Buckley. While many others have covered the tune, Buckley based his version on Simone's, saying of it “that's the only one that matters. That's the be all end all version. She's the king.”

One of the versions Buckley discounted was the 1953 recording of Eartha Kitt. Dubbed by Orson Welles as “the most exciting woman in the world,” Kitt, the Emmy-winning singer and actress, with her throaty voice and exotic looks was the Material Girl of her time. She reached her peak of hip groovihood, surely, when she guest-starred as Catwoman in the final season of the Batman TV series.

But the original Catwoman on the show — the archetypical, the definitive, the greatest Catwoman — was Julie Newmar and, if you'll excuse me, let's just have a look at a photo of her:

Oh yeah. Here's another:

Heaven help us all.

Newmar — not content with being stunningly gorgeous, not content with her strikingly high IQ, not content with her successful business dealings and property developments — has several patents in her name. One is a solution for that dreadful problem plaguing us all, being how to find pantyhose that'll flatten the stomach without flattening the bottom.

Newmar's leg coverings marketed as ‘Nudemar’ (“pantyhose with shaping band for cheeky derriere relief”) sold successfully through the 70s and 80s particularly after she herself modelled it in a revealing photo for People magazine.

There have been other celebrities with the inventor's bug: Jamie Lee Curtis invented nappies with pockets to hold baby wipes; Marlon Brando has the patent for a tool that adjusts the tension on skins of drums; Gary Burghoff brought the ‘fish attractor device’ into the world. I don't know what this device is — it's something to do with fishing, I presume. Fishing must have be one of his hobbies, along with the philately and jazz drumming.

There's an episode of MASH — in which Burghoff played Radar O'Reilly — where he gets to play a drum solo. The sound for it is not dubbed on which is the usual thing directors do but you hear the actual performance Burghoff did in front of the camera which is pretty cool. You've got to enjoy seeing that sort of thing.

Burghoff was the only regular cast member of the TV series to have performed in the earlier Robert Altman MASH movie. Altman's film was released in 1970 and of the five Oscars it was nominated for that year, the category it won was Best Screenplay which amuses me as I'm not sure it had one: so much of the dialogue was improvised. Altman claims that MASH was the first major studio film to use the word “fuck” so there's one for your next trivia night. The cast included Donald Sutherland as Hawkeye and Elliot Gould as a cracking good Trapper and Sally Kellerman as Hot Lips.

Regular readers may know how much I love talking about Star Trek. Oh yes. You can't stop me going on and on about Star Trek, so here's some more for you: Gene Roddenberry made a pilot episode of Star Trek in 1964 called ‘The Cage’ but nobody picked it up so he made a second one called ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’ which got the TV series into production. This episode featured the same Sally Kellerman playing a Starfleet psychiatrist who gets kidnapped by the baddie in the episode.

I've not seen this pilot but reading synopses of the thing make it seem twee and quaint. Here's some dialogue:

“You fools! Soon I'll squash you like insects!” — Mitchell (the baddie)

“Do you like what you see? Absolute power corrupting absolutely?” — Kirk to Kellerman's character.

“Hey, man, I remember you back at the Academy… a stack of books with legs!” — Mitchell to Kirk

and so on. I don't think this would have won any Oscars for Best Screenplay.

This Mitchell character was played by Gary Lockwood who is most famous for his role as Frank Poole in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Lockwood's first scene in that film — one of the movie's most famous (if not one of cinematic history's most famous) — shows him jogging through the ship's centrifuge, shadow boxing, to keep in shape, while Kubrick has the soundtrack play a lugubrious, dreamy cello piece from Khachaturian's ballet Gayene — music evoking how slow and boring the routine of months in space would be.

Aram Khachaturian was an Armenian composer, a contemporary of such people as Prokofiev and Shostakovich — writing honest, uplifting, Soviet music at Stalin's pleasure. His piano concerto is a real corker. Of all pieces in the piano repertoire it is my favourite to listen to. Keep your Bachs, your Beethovens, your Rachmaninoffs… this is my pick.

While I'm sharing, I'd say Shostakovich's fifth symphony would be my favourite orchestral piece. Some may say it is a clichéd choice but those people can get stuffed. It's solid gold. That march? Eerie and disturbing. The slow movement: heart-stopping. Play it at my funeral.

As Ian MacDonald pointed out in his book The New Shostakovich, Dmitri Shostakovich, while writing a symphony that would be easy listening for the Simple Russian People and cheery, good-willed stuff to make Stalin not want to have him tried as a traitor, left musical “coded messages” throughout the piece describing an oppressed soul raging against the tethers of the dictatorship.

Ian MacDonald's book, a controversial one when it was released due to its sudden, Western-friendly rewriting of the Shostakovich legacy, has now become the most trusted reading of the maestro's works. Another MacDonald book was a study of The Beatles' output and perhaps his fusion of writing and music was encouraged by his fellow students at Kings College, Cambridge when he was a lad. Among these fellow students he met at Kings were composers Andrew Davis and John Eliot Gardiner and writer Salman Rushdie.

Rushdie enjoyed both popular and critical success with his 1981 novel Midnight's Children winning that year's Booker prize, and in 1989 Ayatollah Khomeini went on radio in Iran, announced that Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses was blasphemous against Islam and proclaimed a fatwa requiring Rushdie's assasination. At least one attempt on Rushdie's life is believed to have occurred and today the fatwa has still not been lifted.

The most famous celebrity to have been condemned for what people took as his defence of the fatwa (he merely described the fatwa from the Islamic point of view — he was vehemently against applying it to Rushdie) was the singer-songwriter Cat Stevens. This guy somehow sold bucketloads of albums in the late 60s and early 70s: millions and millions of albums like his Tea for the Tillerman and the triple platinum Teaser and the Firecat were sold. The song ‘Katmandu’ from an earlier album (which sold a shipload) featured a 20-year-old Peter Gabriel playing the flute.

Gabriel had been playing for a number of years with a bunch of schoolfriends in a band he'd named Genesis and they were starting to earn some notice with their flamboyant stage costumes and unusual lighting and whatnot. By the mid-70s Gabriel was coping badly with being the leadman of the band and quit. The split inspired his song ‘Solsbury Hill’ (“my friends would think I was a nut”) which would be my favourite Peter Gabriel number.

Coming second would be ‘Sledgehammer’: great bass sound, the head-nodding outro lasting a good third of the song's running time, and of course the award-winning video clip produced by Peter Lord's company Aardman Animation.

This was back in the days before Lord hired Nick Park who brought the company all their Wallace and Gromit fame but after the success of the ‘Sledgehammer’ video Peter Lord and his team were commissioned to do a number of video clips including — 12 months after the Gabriel song — the 1987 re-release of Nina Simone's My Baby Just Cares For Me I was watching as a lad.

Thanks to YouTube, here it is:

  ¶ 9:15 pm 10 comments

  Presents cricket melons In yet another of those you-know-you're-getting-old-when moments that seem to be cascading past in staggering numbers at the moment, I'm pretty sure that my birthday last week was the first I've ever had where I received no presents at all.

The birthday was lovely and I spoke to lots of family and friends and the crew at the office made a fuss and we all had cake. Delightful. But dammit, I would have liked a present.

Certainly nothing elaborate: maybe a cute Harpo mug, or a nice little picture frame, or even some deodorant or an old shareware copy of Doom or something. I'd have been thrilled…

The cricket club had a practice match on the weekend. It was the first time I'd had a cricket bat in my hand since an eye operation I underwent earlier in the year and oh my god what a difference it makes. I admit I was facing some rather toothless bowling but the ease with which I could pick up the pace of the ball and get to the pitch was thrilling. Sport hasn't been very enjoyable these last few years but I am really looking forward to this new season now.

The practice match itself was a pleasure. Sunday was a beautiful afternoon. A number of players from another club we get on well with joined us and we had a couple of games on neighbouring fields going. The other crowd gave us an afternoon tea and we put on a BBQ after the game. It was good-spirited, slow-tempo, relaxed and thoroughly enjoyable.

I haven't posted with any particular point this morning. So what's new, eh?

Does anybody know any jokes? Why did the melons get married at home? Because they cantaloupe.

  ¶ 9:25 am 7 comments

  This was the reason the internet was invented   ¶ 3:10 pm 5 comments

  Spa and a sauna I'm really not much of a skier. I have had a day or two on the snowboard each of the last few winters and rather enjoyed it in much the same way as you rather enjoy helping your friends build decking in their backyard.

Last weekend I went to the snow with the sole purpose of being extremely lazy.

I managed to achieve my goals through a strategic use of the Lying About maneouver followed by the power one-two of a long read of the paper and a long bath with book and a glass of wine. I was able to cross off a number of items from my 'next action' list such as: take a short stroll, sit on the couch reading some more of my book, bake some scones, yawn and stretch, carry snow from one spot to another, sudoku.

Bugger the snowboarding. This is how you're supposed to spend your time at Hotham.

  ¶ 10:15 am 6 comments

  Tumble I have received a friendly injunction to post a little more regularly.

I will post when I'm goddam good and ready.

I've been silent mostly due to the fact that I don't much fancy the thought of whinging a great deal on my blog and that's basically all I'd do at the moment.

For example: I took a tumble on the bike this morning. Some dude was turning right and the ute behind him — as you do — zapped around the dude by veering into the empty bicycle lane and parallel parking bit to the left. Except, as you'd have guessed, it wasn't empty: I was riding my bike through it at the time.

No harm done. I have a little bump on my elbow and a pedal is bent which I'm not fussed about — the pushy needs a fair bit of work anyway — and the driver was genuinely concerned and apologetic.

That sudden rush of shock and adrenaline you get at those moments is quite tasty, though. I basked in its afterglow for the rest of my ride to the office.

At such times it is common to get all militant about car drivers and rant about how irresponsible and dangerous they all are and then repeat the spiel about how bicycles don't waste fuel and fill parking spaces and cause traffic jams yada yada yada. People get so uppity about things. Bikes are better than cars. Cyclists are menaces. BMXs vs road bikes; Holdens vs Fords; Fitzroy St vs Brunswick St; Australia vs New Zealand; black vs white.

Get over it.

The driver of the ute could have looked more carefully for me, but then I could also have been more active when I saw the car stopping to turn right: that's a big flashing neon warning sign for a cyclist.

It's not a question of cyclists vs drivers. It is merely me versus the rest of the universe and that's true of each of us.

  ¶ 9:45 am 7 comments

  Having strained my voice on the weekend I am trying to recover by speaking as little as possible.

People come up to me at work and say “Yo ma homey ma homey yo dope punk da Harpmeister.” Yes this is exactly how we talk in the office “Yo da H-man yo ma Marx bro ma homey ma homey etcetera. Yo lay down some o dat mad phat linked list library shee-yit on me ma homey ma homey. Word.”

And I would like to reply “excuse me, there is no longer any requirement for a linked list library as I can just instanciate some objects and store them in a Vector. To rewrite such functionality would be a waste of everybody's time and I need to finish this GUI I'm working on by EOB tomorrow.”

But I'm trying to speak as little as possible so I say “sure.”

People stop me on the street and say “Prithee stay young ruffian. Whither thou on such a blustery and foreboding post-prandial hour? Dost thou not espy a loathsome tempest upon the lowering horizon? Get ye within yonder taproom and 'scape the fearsome bluster.”

I usually reply, when stopped in this way, “I wouldn't go in that pub if lightning was setting my clothing alight and the path to it was strewn with gold. And more than that, nobody ever spoke in that stupid ‘prithee’ way. ‘Whither thou’ for God's sake! Leave me alone. Freak.”

But no, rest is vital for a strained voice so I reply “yep. Thanks.”

It's all about drinking lots of warm water, avoiding dairy and being extremely compliant.

  ¶ 4:25 pm 6 comments

  Harpo gets to do something fun We are playing at the Barleycorn on the weekend which is a gig I've been looking forward to for some time. It has been much too long since I've been on stage and I do enjoy it so. The People too have been deprived of our particular brand of hot rock and are starting to get restless. The Spanish civil war started in much the same way.

So, anyway, it should be fun.

  ¶ 4:00 pm 0 comments

  Sporting capital of the world I gathered with some mates at a pub in Richmond to watch the quarterfinal between Australia and Japan.

A footy game at the MCG had finished only a few hours earlier so obviously the room was full of beefy lads with overdeveloped foreheads, product-filled hair, upturned collars, bourbon and cokes and brilliant bon mots about fat chicks, car theft and homos.

I'm glad they were getting into the soccer. Good on them. Naturally the only thing they could think of to encourage our tiring representatives as the game wore on was to cry out “Aussie Aussie Aussie” at the TV screen at which some others answered with the clever reply “oi oi oi” which struck almost everybody in the room as pure genius. I was certainly cheered by such a creative display of pride in one's homeland.

They howled as one with surprise and indignation whenever somebody fell to the ground after a tackle. They were endearingly bewildered by the red card as if we were never going to suffer harsh decisions. One of them wittily described the referee as a homo. Oh how everybody laughed.

The game itself was an entertaining spectacle. The Japanese were as well-organised and sharp as expected and Australia had a few good patches. The Aussies played a valiant last 45 minutes a man down in difficult conditions and the draw after extra time was actually a good result against a team better and ranked higher than us. A couple of guys gave tired penalties at the end and out we went. After the dreadful, dreadful displays in the first two games, this match I rather enjoyed.

My footy-loving neighbours in the bar were not so generous. When they were finally able to remember his name they had same things to say about Graeme Arnold and how quickly that homo should be fired.

  ¶ 12:45 pm 1 comments