I’m a commercial junkie. I could almost watch TV strictly for the commercials. What other media requires an introduction, a plot, a conclusion…. all in 30-60 seconds! A serious art form!
But two commercials are bugging me lately.
#1. That Mr. Clean Magic Eraser thing
#2. The Kikkoman “Umami is in all our products” thing.
Both of these annoy me because they hinge around products that, as a society, we shunned years ago. however, with careful marketing, a bit of sneakiness and a whole lot of redirection…these compounds are back in our hands and in our diets.
The Mr. Clean Magic Eraser uses (as I understand it) formaldehyde … FORMALDEHYDE!!! And we are to wet it and use bare hands to scrub it into things to clean. Excellent! Formaldehyde is a known carcinogen. It was taken out of the schools years ago. It was removed from the jars of preserved specimens and replaced with ethanol. But somehow, some genius decided we needed it back again in a cleaning agent. Nope, uh uh. not in my house.
And that Umami thing? I try to keep up on foodie stuff and when I saw that commercial I headed to do some research. And this is what I found.
From Wikipedia:
Umami is one of the five generally recognized basic tastes sensed by specialized receptor cells present on the human tongue. Umami is a loanword from Japanese meaning roughly “tasty”, although “brothy”, “meaty”, or “savory” have been proposed as alternative translations. In as much as it describes the flavor common to savory products such as meat, cheese, and mushrooms, umami is similar to Brillat-Savarin’s concept of osmazome, an early attempt to describe the main flavoring component of meat as extracted in the process of making stock.
The umami taste is due to the detection of the carboxylate anion of glutamic acid, a naturally occurring amino acid common in meats, cheese, broth, stock, and other protein-heavy foods. Salts of the glutamic acid, known as glutamates, easily hydrolyze and give the same taste. For this reason they are used as flavor enhancers.
Did you catch that bit? Glutamic acid…. or glutamates? Yes, Umami is a fancy word for monosodium glutamate. Good old MSG is making a sneaky comeback and the companies using it are now actually promoting that they have exactly what most of them tried to hide or remove… except now it has a fancy new word to make us all run out and feel better about buying and ingesting it.
MSG isn’t all bad, it is a natural compound found in many good foods like mackerel, Sea bream, tuna, shellfish, beef, pork, chicken, mushrooms, potatoes, carrots, soy beans, parmesan cheese and green tea. But I can’t help but wonder if we are heading down a road where companies will start to add MSG into their foods so they can claim “Umami”.