This may be a small matter or a momentous one, depending on whom you ask; but mark today's story about the attempt to force Heinz to alter its ketchup recipe. The intention is to reduce its sodium content by 25%; probably the intentions are good, or are at least defensible as public policy.

They are also wrong, and indeed wicked. Heinz ketchup is something like a precious work of art: it's that rarest of things, an instance of perfection. It may be that many have forgotten one of the most interesting articles ever written about the human palate; if you have, read it again. It starts with the question of why there are so many 'gourmet' mustards and spaghetti sauces ('gourmet' is in scare quotes in deference to Ogden Nash); but there is only one ketchup.

It turns out the reason is that ketchup, and particularly Heinz ketchup, happens to be perfect.

There are five known fundamental tastes in the human palate: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. Umami is the proteiny, full-bodied taste of chicken soup, or cured meat, or fish stock, or aged cheese, or mother's milk, or soy sauce, or mushrooms, or seaweed, or cooked tomato. "Umami adds body," Gary Beauchamp, who heads the Monell Chemical Senses Center, in Philadelphia, says. "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." When Heinz moved to ripe tomatoes and increased the percentage of tomato solids, he made ketchup, first and foremost, a potent source of umami. Then he dramatically increased the concentration of vinegar, so that his ketchup had twice the acidity of most other ketchups; now ketchup was sour, another of the fundamental tastes. The post-benzoate ketchups also doubled the concentration of sugar--so now ketchup was also sweet--and all along ketchup had been salty and bitter. These are not trivial issues. Give a baby soup, and then soup with MSG (an amino-acid salt that is pure umami), and the baby will go back for the MSG soup every time, the same way a baby will always prefer water with sugar to water alone. Salt and sugar and umami are primal signals about the food we are eating--about how dense it is in calories, for example, or, in the case of umami, about the presence of proteins and amino acids. What Heinz had done was come up with a condiment that pushed all five of these primal buttons. The taste of Heinz's ketchup began at the tip of the tongue, where our receptors for sweet and salty first appear, moved along the sides, where sour notes seem the strongest, then hit the back of the tongue, for umami and bitter, in one long crescendo.

There are some things a civilization ought to preserve, and art is one of them; art that approaches perfection especially. The man who thinks to improve our lives by removing the sublime, even if it comes in a ketchup bottle, that man is an actual enemy of humanity.