Forget the sheep and the goats. This distinction is much more critical, at least for the here-and-now.

The Sept. 6, 2004 New Yorker had a fascinating article on mustard and ketchup. In addition to the Four Basic Tastes I already knew about (sweet, salty, bitter, and sour), I learned there’s a fifth taste, umami, which author Malcolm Gladwell describes as “the proteiny, full-bodied taste of chicken soup, or cured meat, or fish stock, or aged cheese, or mother’s milk, or soy sauce, or mushrooms, or seaweed, or cooked tomato.” Umami comes from glutamates, which is why MSG livens up foods. You can read more about the origins of umami here, and you can read about the Society for Research on Umami Taste (SRUT) here. And from the World Wide Words website, we learn of the higher consciousness implicit in the concept of umami:

Both the word and the concept are Japanese, and in Japan are of some antiquity. Umami is hard to translate, to judge by the number of English words that have been suggested as equivalents, such as savoury, essence, pungent, deliciousness, and meaty. It’s sometimes associated with a feeling of perfect quality in a taste, or of some special emotional circumstance in which a taste is experienced. It is also said to involve all the senses, not just that of taste. There’s more than a suggestion of a spiritual or mystical quality about the word.

But the real kicker in the article, for me anyway, was the comparison between mustard and ketchup. Mustard is not a high umami food, apparently, and the best marketing success comes from tailoring a variety of mustards to a variety of food preferences. Ketchup, on the other hand, perhaps because it has achieved not only high umami but high “amplitude” (Gladwell again: “the word sensory experts use to describe flavors that are well blended and balanced, that ‘bloom’ in the mouth”), is a food that does not succeed in tailored or multiple versions. Heinz Ketchup has apparently achieved a Platonic state that’s just not shared with many other foods. Shoot, even spaghetti sauce thrives in multiple versions–but not ketchup.

These facts are interesting but not earthshaking, until one sees the moral Gladwell draws.

Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preference. But that makes it easy to forget that sometimes happiness can be found in having what we’ve always had and everyone else is having.

In those two little sentences there are worlds of implications, for lawmakers, for teachers, for parents, for information technology folk, for everyone.

My thanks to Malcolm Gladwell for finding the universe in a seed of mustard and a squeeze-bottle of ketchup.