Roots, With or Without MSG

As discussed in the post below on roots of the world, I've been thinking about a set of Root Estates to use instead of Earth, Air, Fire and Water, something that hasn't been used in games or, ideally, mysticism, but that seems systematic and comprehensive. The candidate set should be rich in associations and symbolism, yet as concrete as possible. The question is what concept could meet those requirements.

The answer is on the tip of your tongue, and the middle, and the back. The Root Estates are the taste sensations:

Saltiness
Bitterness
Sweetness
Sourness

Saltiness is as real as water. Sweetness is tangible as earth. They mean things. At the same time, they suggest things. "He's a salty character." "She has a sour disposition." "These are bitter times." Certainly you could design an entire roleplaying game with these as attributes. It's easy enough to plausibly overlay the tastes on the seasons: Summer is sweet; Winter is bitter. If Summer is sweet, then autumn is when things sour. Spring is salty? Spring is the season of water and new life. Saltiness is the taste of the sea, source of life. Or maybe you prefer to associate Salt with summer, season of sweat, and sweetness with fecund spring.

The Spirit World section of the Great White Book (p. 36) tells us that "the immediate vicinity of each root attaches to an Age of the World. The game takes place during the Third Age, the Age of Pain. That pretty clearly attaches to the Bitter Root. The Second Age, dominated by the consequences of The Fall, would be Sour.

The First Age is a bit tricky. I associate it with Salt because of its newness and its mingling of joy and pain. The First Age is the soup out of which the concepts we live by will come. That makes the Fourth Age the prize to be eyed, as it will be the Sweet Epoch.

Salty, Bitter, Sour and Sweet. That's the way we learned it in school. Turns out, though, that this system too has a Fifth Element, and for symmetry's sake it comes from China.

Umami is the taste of glutamates, such as, yes, MSG. This turns out to be primary - that is, it has specific tongue receptors and the perception of it can not be duplicated by any combination of the other four taste elements.

So claims this article, anyway, in which food editors sample chicken stock flavored each with one of the five taste sensations. You hate to see a good fourfold system complicated by reality. I find myself tempted to grasp at

Thirty-eight percent of the editors mistakenly identified the salt-only chicken stock as the one containing MSG. Although many people have the misperception that MSG makes food taste saltier, MSG contains only one-third the amount of sodium as table salt

Hey, how can it be a misperception, I wonder.

A problem for the Western HG to overcome is that, since umami is a new concept outside of Asia, we haven't developed a set of associations for it yet. What would it mean to say, "You're an umami little boy" instead of "You're a sweet little boy." But umami is a taste, and therefore real. And the Family Haven article offers some insight:

In terms of taste preferences, however, 75 percent of the editors indicated they preferred the broth with the UMAMI flavor contributed by glutamate. They described the taste as "rich," "well-rounded," "savory," "full-bodied," "brothy," and "more chicken-like."

Kind of earthy, is one way of putting it.

So it depends whether you want four roots or five. (I haven't decided for our campaign yet.) There does seem to be a major conceptual gain in adding an Umami Root to the other four.

Posted by supplanter at July 20, 2002 03:29 PM