The Umami Theory of Value
a global pandemic struck, markets crashed, and the possibility of a democratic socialist presidency in America started to fade. Much of our work with clients has been about how to address new audiences in a time of massive fragmentation and the collapse of consensus reality.
All the while, people have been eager to launch new products more focused on impressions than materiality, and “spending on experiences” has become the standard of premium consumption.
it’s time to reassess the consumer experience that came along with the neoliberal fantasy of “unlimited” movement of people, goods and ideas around the globe.
Umami, as both a quality and effect of an experience, popped up primarily in settings that were on the verge of disintegration, and hinged on physical pilgrimages to evanescent meccas.
We also believe that the experience economy is dying, its key commodity (umami) has changed status, and nobody knows what’s coming next.
Umami was the quality of the media mix or the moodboard that granted it cohesion-despite-heterogeneity. Umami was also the proximity of people on Emily’s museum panel, all women who are mostly not old, mostly not straight, and mostly doing something interesting in the arts, but we didn’t know exactly what. It was the conversation-dance experience and the poet’s play and the alt-electronica-diva’s first foray into another discipline. It was the X-factor that made a certain MA-1 worth 100x as much as its identical twin.
“Advanced consumers” became obsessed with umami and then ran around trying to collect ever-more-intensifying experiences of it. Things were getting more and more delicious, more and more expensive, and all the while, more and more immaterial.
Umami is what you got when you didn’t get anything.
What was actually happening was the enrichment of financial assets over the creation of any ‘real wealth’ along with corresponding illusions of progress.
As very little of this newly minted money has been invested into building new productive capacity, infrastructure, or actually new things, money has just been sloshing around in a frothy cesspool – from WeWork to Juicero to ill-advised real estate Ponzi to DTC insanity, creating a global everything-bubble.
Value, in an economic sense, is theoretically created by new things based on new ideas. But when the material basis for these new things is missing or actively deteriorating and profits must be made, what is there to be done? Retreat to the immaterial and work with what already exists: meaning.
Meaning is always readily available to be repeated, remixed, and/or cannibalized in service of creating the sensation of the new.
The essential mechanics are simple: it’s stating there’s a there-there when there isn’t one. And directing attention to a new “there” before anyone notices they were staring at a void. It’s the logic of gentrification, not only of the city, but also the self, culture and civilization itself.
What’s made us so gullible, and this whole process possible, was an inexhaustible appetite for umami.
eyond its synergistic effect, umami has a few other sensory effects that are relevant to our theory. For one, it creates the sense of thickness and body in food. (“Umami adds body…If you add it to a soup, it makes the soup seem like it’s thicker – it gives it sensory heft. It turns a soup from salt water into a food.”) For another, it’s released when foods break down into parts. (“When organic matter breaks down, the glutamate molecule breaks apart. This can happen on a stove when you cook meat, over time when you age a parmesan cheese, by fermentation as in soy sauce or under the sun as a tomato ripens. When glutamate becomes L-glutamate, that’s when things get “delicious.””) These three qualities: SYNERGY, IMPRESSION OF THICKNESS, and PARTS > WHOLE, are common to cultural umami, as well.
Umami hunting was a way for the West to consume an exotic, ethnic, global “taste” that was also invisible and up to their decoding / articulation.
when something is correctly salted, Chang argues, it tastes both over and undersalted at once. As a strange loop, this saltiness makes you stand back and regard your food; you start thinking about “the system it represents and your response to it”. He argues that this meta-regard keeps you in the moment and connected to the deliciousness of your food. We counter that it intensifies a moment in a flow, temporarily thickening your experience without keeping you anywhere for long.
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 seem like what it’s supposed to be”
“This is both too much and not enough”
“I shouldn’t be here but i am”
“This could be anywhere but it’s here”
Parts > Whole is just another way of saying a combination of things has emergent properties. In itself this doesn’t mean much, as almost any combination of things has emergent properties, especially in the domains of taste and culture. Coffee + vinegar is worse than its constitutive parts. A suit + sneakers is a greater kind of corny than either worn separately. Most emergence is trivial. The Umami Theory of Value centers on losing your sense of what’s trivial and what’s valuable.
If you tried to unpack your intuition, the absence of the there-there would quickly become evident.
Yet in practice this didn’t matter, because few people were able to reach this kind of deep self-interrogation. The cycle was simply too fast. There was never time for these concoctions to congeal into actual new things (e.g. create the general category of K-Pop patrons for Central European arts institutions). We can’t be sure if they ever meant anything beyond seeming yummy at the time.
This was not meant to be a nihilistic, Gen-X faceplant (“nothing means anything any more”), since we think that perspective can paper over the nuances of consumer experience, business realities, and cultural crisis. Instead, we wanted to link macroeconomic and macrotrend observations to everyday experience, especially in the context of burgeoning collapse.