Edible Vancouver Island Jan/Feb 2023

The recent phenomenon of loss of smell due to COVID-19 raises the question: how much does our sense of smell impact our experience of tasting food?

dulling down of smell and taste that got progressively worse. I could still smell things if I held them directly under my nose, but it was significantly diminished. There would be sparks of taste—just a millisecond and then it was gone. I could detect ba sic flavours like salty, sweet or spicy, but I couldn’t say how spicy something was or what the spices were. It lacked the subtleties.” I asked how this impacted her enjoyment of food and selections she made. “I was making choices based mainly on nutritional value, with an emphasis on liquids,” she reflected. The full plea sure of food was gone. Having chocolate, for example, would have been pointless, and coffee tasted terrible. Lori’s loss of smell was short-lived, lasting only about eight days. For others, the loss of smell can last much longer, for weeks and months, and in very rare cases, it can be somewhat permanent. Currently there is no cure for this smell loss, although improve ments have been shown using olfactory training. This is typically a low-tech therapy of introducing different smells using essential oils. It’s similar to the process used by people in professions where a keen nose is critical to their success, such as perfumers and sommeliers. SME LL AND TASTE AS SURV I VAL MECHAN I SMS Aside from making the experience of eating more nuanced and enjoyable, smell and taste play a critically important role in our survival. Humans and animals alike are thankfully designed to avoid foods that are harmful to us, such as spoiled meat or poi

sonous plants. It’s not foolproof, of course—don’t sample your way through the forest’s array of mushrooms without a guide— but nature does help us out more often than not. The repugnant odour of rotten meat is a good example of this principle. On the flip side, humans across all cultures tend to favour salty and sweet tastes, which provide vital nutrients: minerals in the case of salt, and sugars and vitamins in the case of sweeter foods. We tend to be more wary of sour and bitter tastes as they are more often associated with harmful substances. Smell, memory and emotion are closely linked in the limbic sys tem of our brains. Perhaps this is another mechanism to ensure our survival as we remember the foods that make us feel ill and avoid them in the future. F I NAL THOUGHTS The next time you find yourself being seduced by the alluring aromas of food cooking that trigger your salivary glands in anticipation, you might be more aware of the complex biologi cal mechanisms working together to give us the multi-sensory experience of eating. Pausing for a moment to smell food and feel gratitude before eating has the added benefit of calming our nervous system so our bodies are better prepared to digest food. When we are conscious of each of our senses, and the intricate interplay between them, we can appreciate how preparing and eating food is one of the greatest pleasures of the human experi ence.

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