Returning to the Umami Theory of Value

His conclusion is this: “Different cultures may use different media to express those base patterns—with different ingredients, for instance, depending on what’s available. But they are, at heart, doing the exact same thing. They are fundamentally playing the same music. And if you can recognize that music, you’ll blow people’s minds with a paradox ... See more

To us, Chang’s essay gets to the heart of the matter. Through the lens of his theory, we’ve come to see it this way: strong flavors, namely umami, mark a surge of intensity in the flow of experience. It also becomes clear that paradox itself is at the heart of contemporary consumption.

For example:

“This shouldn’t be good but it is”

“This doesn’t see... See more

The umami generation process accelerated by breaking cultural things into discrete marketable parts through which they become even more consumable and easier to mix into novel, delicious combinations, often across different sensory domains. These combinations could be unstable – as in actually plain dumb, dysfunctional, dangerous – because they did... See more