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The ‘Philippines Handbook’  (Moon Publications, California - 1993) - says about General Luna:  'Try poot-poot a delicious local fish dish'.  So does the Lonely Planet Guide

So, if a naive tourist asks for 'a bowl of poot-poot, please' he or she is greeted only with polite stares and barely concealed giggles. No poot-poot arrives. The reason? Filipinos really don't like to give the 'wrong' answer - a negative, a refusal, so on. 

And everybody knows that poot-poot ginamos from GL is world-famous, don't they? So why is this dumb, ignorant incomer asking for a bowl of it ? With nothing else ? What to say?

The baffled tourist goes away (as I did) thinking 'What dumb, ignorant people these are'.

GL’s Poot-Poot Ginamos is world famous (well, at least to parts of Manila, which is far enough).

Ginamos is a basic fish sauce, made from ¾ poot-poot (anchovy fry) and ¼ sea salt, mixed carefully, and kept in a jar for as long as you need. The fish progressively 'ferments'  in the jar until it has practically disintegrated.

In other parts of the Philippines the liquor is drained off as 'patis', a very common Filipino table condiment, and the residue packed as 'bago'ong' pungent fish paste, often spiced as well. 

Street vendors carry 'bago'ong' as an essential accompaniment for sliced green mango - the salty fish taste perfectly complements the tart mango. It is also used as a dipping sauce, mixed with the juice of 'calamansi' the Filipino 'lemon'.

'What strange eating habits these far-away exotic peoples have!' - you might say. Well, don't. 

UMAMI

The fifth taste.

"It’s usually said that the human tongue can detect only four basic tastes: sweet, sour, bitter and salty, and that all tastes are combinations of these. Many specialists now believe that taste is actually more complicated than this, with the taste buds being helped along by sense of smell, by the feel of substances in the mouth and even by the noise that food makes when we chew it.

In recent years some workers (about a century ago in Japan, so not really acceptable to Real Scientists) have added a fifth taste, umami, to the other four, though western food scientists are divided about whether it really exists or not. It has been suggested that the taste is triggered by compounds of some amino acids, such as glutamates or aspartates, especially the flavour-enhancing substance monosodium glutamate.

Both the word and the concept are Japanese, and in Japan are of some antiquity. Umami is hard to translate, to judge by the number of English words that have been suggested as equivalents, such as savoury, essence, pungent, deliciousness, and meaty. It’s sometimes associated with a feeling of perfect quality in a taste, or of some special emotional circumstance in which a taste is experienced. It is also said to involve all the senses, not just that of taste. There’s more than a suggestion of a spiritual or mystical quality about the word".
World Wide Words © Michael Quinion

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Professor Kikunae Ikeda of Tokyo Imperial University was thinking about the taste of food: "There is a taste which is common to asparagus, tomatoes, cheese and meat but which is not one of the four well-known tastes of sweet, sour, bitter and salty."

It was in 1907 that Professor Ikeda started his experiments to identify what the source of this distinctive taste was.  He knew that it was present in the "broth" made from kombu (a type of seaweed) found in traditional Japanese cuisine. Starting with a tremendous quantity of kombu broth, he succeeded in extracting crystals of glutamic acid (or glutamate). Glutamate is an amino acid, and is a building block of protein. Professor Ikeda found that glutamate had a distinctive taste, different from sweet, sour, bitter and salty, and he named it "umami". 100 grams of dried kombu contain about 1 gram of glutamate.
The Discovery of Umami

And so, Monosodium Glutamate was born

Humans can recognize five tastes: bitter, salty, sour, sweet and umami. Umami is the most difficult to describe (it's the flavor associated with monosodium glutamate). Now, researchers led by Charles S. Zuker and Nicholas J. P. Ryba have identified a taste receptor that responds to amino acids, including umami. Given that many amino acids are essential components of our diet, this work may also aid understanding of how animals, including humans, regulate nutritional intake to achieve a balanced diet.

Zuker's and Ryba's groups previously collaborated in discovering sweet and bitter taste receptors.

According to Zuker, discovery of the amino acid taste receptor will have important implications for understanding the machinery of taste. "When Nick Ryba and I began this collaboration a bit over four years ago, our ultimate goal was to understand how the brain knows what you just tasted," he said. "We wanted to discover how taste receptor cells are activated and how their signals travel to the brain to produce specific taste perceptions.

"To do that, we first needed to define the different taste modalities at a cellular level, so that we could then follow their connectivity maps to the brain. The "Holy Grail" in this field has been the receptors, and now that we know the receptors underlying three modalities - sweet, bitter and amino acid - we can begin to work on our original goal, to map this system to understand how taste is encoded," Zuker said. 
Homing In On a Receptor for the Fifth Taste