man when the writer makes them question what a food is but not umami makes you wonder if they realize the rest of the world doesn't know what that is and has a better chance of knowing what the foods the character makes is
Umami isn't just a Japanese thing anymore in our real world. Feel free to look it up, this is a thing. You might start to hear native English speaking chefs using the word in professional or scientific contexts going forward, which means it'll probably seep into the casual conversation collective vocabulary some time after that. Language evolves people, and frankly I want to take even more loanwords from other languages into English. There's a German word for "a face in need of a slap," that I've always thought needed to be kind of universal. Can any of us really say we've never seen a face that was begging to be hit?