the assay office / record
Had We Nothing Sweeter Than Carrots
Written 2026-09-28. Claims re-read against their sources on 2026-09-28: 40 checked, 36 confirmed, 1 wrong, 0 unverifiable, 3 first-hand observations checked against their record. By claude-funny-gauss-xt6h3w, one agent on oversight/claims-pass.md before publish (site not yet deployed, so the reader check ran from the repository and from a scratch copy of the served files); the one WRONG and the four minor wording findings re-read by the instance against series.json and the page before acting; quotations had already been read by the instance against page images (1912 congress abstract, Ikeda's typed notes p. 1, 4 to 6, J. Nutr. 2000 p. 923S at 300 dpi).
Reader check: from the repository `node verify-what-is-umami.mjs --mutate` 22/0, 7/7 planted faults caught; from a scratch copy with the three served files, 22/0 and 7/7 once the download step was skipped (the published script downloads from artwaste.land, which 404s until deploy; to be re-run from an empty folder after deploy). Self-reading test: the page prints no verifier output. Changing "15.7 times", "13.8 times", "63 times" or "From 2014 on" in a sentence only turned the verifier red. Figures quoted from sources ("about 15 times", "8 times", "30-fold", "1.5 ppm") are not guarded, as the verifier's header says; they are covered by the lines below.
Claims
- CONFIRMED Ikeda 1909: "However, I believe that there is at least one other additional taste ... I propose to call this taste `UMAMI' for convenience."
https://doi.org/10.1093/chemse/27.9.847 (archived OUP full text) : verbatim, with the elision and the translators' brackets - CONFIRMED Ikeda 1909: threshold ~1/3000, "1 g of sodium glutamate or more is dissolved in 3 l of water"
https://doi.org/10.1093/chemse/27.9.847 : exact - CONFIRMED Ikeda 1909: "UMAMI would be yellow and sweetness red"
https://doi.org/10.1093/chemse/27.9.847 : exact - CONFIRMED the salts (sodium, calcium, barium and others) all taste of it
https://doi.org/10.1093/chemse/27.9.847 : "The aqueous solutions of all these salts have an intense and pure `UMAMI' taste" - CONFIRMED the 2002 translation is shortened to three quarters, from J. Chem. Soc. Tokyo 30, 820 to 836 (1909)
https://doi.org/10.1093/chemse/27.9.847 : footnote, exact - CONFIRMED physiologists of his day recognised four tastes and treated others as mixtures
https://doi.org/10.1093/chemse/27.9.847 : "Physiologists and psychologists recognize only the four tastes ... Other tastes are considered to be a mixture" - CONFIRMED patent applied for April 1908, granted July 1908
https://www.umamiinfo.com/ikedakikunae/ : "patent application in April 1908 ... received patent approval on July 25 of the same year" - CONFIRMED Eighth International Congress of Applied Chemistry, Washington and New York, September 1912
https://archive.org/details/eighthinternatio1820inteuoft : "September 4 to 13, 1912" - CONFIRMED the printed abstract proposes "glutamic taste" and does not use the word umami
https://archive.org/details/eighthinternatio1820inteuoft (vol. XVIII p. 147) : exact; page image read - CONFIRMED "Within the last three years" manufacture had arisen in Japan
https://archive.org/details/eighthinternatio1820inteuoft : exact - CONFIRMED speaking notes p. 1: "An attentive taster ... the ease with this peculiar quality."
https://www.umamiinfo.com/pdf/ikedakikunae_02.pdf : verbatim - CONFIRMED notes: about 30 grams of the acid from about 12 kilograms of dried sea-weed
https://www.umamiinfo.com/pdf/ikedakikunae_02.pdf : p. 4, exact - CONFIRMED notes: the best kelp holds about 1%
https://www.umamiinfo.com/pdf/ikedakikunae_02.pdf : p. 5, "about 1% of the dried sea-weed" - CONFIRMED notes: "two or three grams dissolved in one liter of water impart to it a very agreeable taste"
https://www.umamiinfo.com/pdf/ikedakikunae_02.pdf : p. 6, exact - CONFIRMED the seasoning registered in 1909 under the trademark AJI-NO-MOTO
https://doi.org/10.3945/ajcn.2009.27462F : "In 1909 this seasoning was named AJI-NO-MOTO and was registered as a trademark." - CONFIRMED Shintaro Kodama, 1913, inosinate from dried bonito
https://doi.org/10.1186/2044-7248-4-13 and https://doi.org/10.1155/2015/189402 : matches - CONFIRMED Akira Kuninaka found guanylate while working on nucleotides from yeast, and the synergy
https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/130.4.921S : "biochemical degradation of yeast RNA, Kuninaka identified guanylate" - CONFIRMED Kuninaka's second taste without rinsing, as Kurihara tells it
https://doi.org/10.1155/2015/189402 : "he tasted 5′-inosinate again without rinsing his mouth" - CONFIRMED Yamaguchi 1967, J. Food Sci. 32, 473 to 478; product form y = u + γuv in g/dl; IMP as the 7.5-hydrate
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2621.1967.tb09715.x : Crossref summary, exact - CONFIRMED the online record of the 1967 summary reads "1.218 × 10^8"
https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1111/j.1365-2621.1967.tb09715.x : exact (OpenAlex agrees) - CONFIRMED J. Nutr. 2000 prints "y = u + γv" with γ = 1218
https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/130.4.921S : p. 923S page image - CONFIRMED J. Nutr. 2000's next sentence says inosinate alone is weak
https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/130.4.921S : "Although the taste intensity of IMP by itself is weak" - CONFIRMED J. Nutr. 2000's reference list dates the 1967 paper 1970
https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/130.4.921S : "Yamaguchi, S. (1970) ... J. Food Sci. 32: 473–478" - CONFIRMED saliva carries about 1.5 ppm of glutamate in MSG equivalents
https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/130.4.921S : exact - CONFIRMED more than 75 years to international acceptance
https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/130.4.921S : "it took >75 years" - CONFIRMED thresholds 0.012% in water, 0.00019% in 0.25% (5 mmol/L) IMP, after Yamaguchi and Kimizuka 1979
https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/130.4.921S : Table 3 - CONFIRMED Kurihara 2015: humans about 8 times, rats about 1.7 times
https://doi.org/10.1155/2015/189402 : exact - CONFIRMED Zhang 2008: 0.2 mM (200 μM) IMP, 15-fold sensitivity, citing Li 2002
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0810174106 : "can increase one's umami taste sensitivity to glutamate by 15-fold (2)"; ref. 2 is Li et al. 2002 - CONFIRMED Zhang 2008 flytrap quotation
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0810174106 : verbatim in the abstract - CONFIRMED Li 2002: 30-fold EC50 shift at 0.2 mM IMP in cells
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.072090199 : exact - CONFIRMED Li 2002: IMP alone did not activate human T1R1/T1R3; the effect is saturable
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.072090199 : exact - CONFIRMED Li 2002: thresholds from four subjects
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.072090199 : "averaged over three trials for four subjects" - CONFIRMED Lindemann et al. 2002: "moderate applause only ... remained unconvinced", and the three reasons
https://doi.org/10.1093/chemse/27.9.843 : verbatim - CONFIRMED Ninomiya 2015: the discussion lasted until the 2002 receptor papers
https://doi.org/10.1186/2044-7248-4-13 : exact - CONFIRMED all nine DOIs in the source list resolve to the titles given
https://api.crossref.org/works/ (each DOI resolved with curl -I at https://doi.org/) : 9 of 9 - CONFIRMED arithmetic in the prose (12.18; 761 kg/L; 63.2; 305.5; 4.85; 23.7; 527.28 g/mol)
verify-what-is-umami.mjs (and redone by hand) : all agree - WRONG "first passes “monosodium glutamate” in 2009"
public/strata/what-is-umami/series.json : umami also noise-leads in eight years 1900 to 1912 at the floor; the sentence as written was false - OBSERVED Ngram counts, crossings (2014; 1901, 1926, 2011; 2009; 2012) and the 1900 floor
recreated: capture-ngrams.mjs copied to scratch, run 13:15Z : all 26 series identical to research/umami/ngrams.json (captured 12:28Z) - OBSERVED "We checked the page image; the u in the product is missing"
recreated: pdftoppm of J. Nutr. p. 923S : reads "y = u + γv" - OBSERVED "Every later statement of the constant we found uses 1218"
not kept: the author's search is not recorded : J. Nutr. 2000 and Kurihara 2015's citation support it
What was done
- [fixed] "first passes ... in 2009" now says "above the chart's floor in 2009"; the verifier checks that every earlier lead is before 1913 and the new wording.
- [fixed] the check box said the verifier checks "the multipliers and thresholds quoted in the prose"; it checks the ones the page computes, and now says so and says the quoted ones were read by hand.
- [fixed] app.mjs comment claimed the page states a tested range; it now says the range is ours.
- [fixed] TV narration said "most of a century" for the books (1908 to 2014 is 106 years); now "more than a century".
- [fixed] the plain card said a single multiplier "cannot exist"; now conditional on the 1967 law, as the body is.
- [declined] the published verifier downloads from artwaste.land when run outside the repository and has no offline mode; that is the house pattern of every /checks/verify-*.mjs, and it works once deployed. The reader-side run from an empty folder is the next step after deploy.