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Comment by isk517 | Hacker News Reader

Mushrooms add to the umami flavour, before salt was easily accessible this was probably your best bet for easy flavour enhansement

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Salt is more fundamental for the body than just flavoring. I'd hesitate even to call it a spice. That said, umami ingredients like mushrooms and seaweed are certainly used together with salt.

Salt has always been freely available from the ocean, which I believe most people lived pretty close to.

MSG is like $0.30/kg.

I don't think they had MSG before salt

Who cares? We don't live "before salt". Human use of salt _predates writing_ by about 3000 years.

You wouldn't choose to do manual typesetting (or copying books by hand!!!) today either versus alternatives.

If you're _just_ looking to add umami flavor to a dish today, you'd be crazy to pick foraging for wild mushrooms over Aji no Moto.

I'm skeptical of any food that humans only started eating since the industrial revolution, including those that are derivatives of or isolated compounds of real food. Mostly the effects on our bodies are not well studied. I haven't specifically read studies on msg though.

How much studying of food do you think was happening before the industrial revolution?

I mean, foods like soy sauce and yogurt and sauerkraut predate industrialization, but are very processed. I wouldn't worry too much about MSG in particular, since it is also mostly made by fermentation:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate

Well you were replying to a comment about why we foraged for them before salt broski. Doesn't really make sense to bring up the price of something that wasn't isolated then.

> Human use of salt _predates writing_ by about 3000 years.

That looks like... an intensely conservative estimate. Deer use salt.

There's a long history of glutamate containing food and food products being used in place of salt across the world, before it was first chemically isolated.

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