Chemical Engineering in Daily Life – Question 25: Do you know about the five flavors in food? Standard answer already exists

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This post was last edited by yjqin1 on 2015-9-9 08:36. We often say that there are all five flavors: bitter, spicy, sour, sweet, and salty. In fact, the five flavors in physiology and nutrition do not include spicy. Spiciness is a kind of irritation, a sensation in a different sense. People in China, especially those from Hunan, Jiangxi, Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan, have a particular preference for spicy food; actually, spiciness is something that originated abroad. I don’t like spicy food, so I really don’t enjoy any Chinese dishes that contain dried or fresh chili peppers. On the other hand, I like Shanghai cuisine, Cantonese cuisine, and Huaiyang cuisine (especially those from the Taizhou area), so I’m willing to travel there often and take the opportunity to work on some environmental protection projects related to energy conservation and emission reduction in those areas. I remember back when I was in Europe, in those bygone days of that great nation; during casual conversations, a foreign friend asked me, “Who do you hate the most?” I replied that I hated Christopher Columbus and your queen the most. He urgently asked why I said that if it hadn’t been for your queen who allowed Columbus to discover the New World, the Old World would have had no tobacco (I really hate smokers), no chili peppers, no potatoes (which were one of the main staples in the 1960s and 1970s), no sweet potatoes (another of the main staples during those years), and no corn (the third of the main staples in the 1960s and 1970s). Please stop being negative; if you were forced to eat lobster for every meal, for three or five years straight, you would probably want to kill the person who is giving you the lobster. What is the fifth taste in biological terms? It’s fresh. May I ask which of the following items are umami enhancers? 1. Sodium glutamate ； 2. Sodium succinate ； 3. Sodium hypoxanthine nucleoside ； 4. Sodium guanosine nucleotide ； 5. Sodium glycinate ； 6. Sodium arginate.