hadn’t realized what a role scent played in my mouth until it was gone. I hadn’t realized the full extent of my loss until it was there, hanging over each bite of dinner, each sip of tea.
While at the Monell Chemical Senses Center I met Marcia Pelchat. She is a sensory psychologist who studies the science of flavor and food preference and often demonstrates the relationship between taste and smell with a jelly bean. Close your eyes and pick a jelly bean out of a bowl. Do it blindly, so you won’t know the flavor before you put it on your tongue. Pinch your nose shut, so you can only breathe out of your mouth, pop the bean in, and begin to chew. What can you taste? Can you tell what kind of jelly bean you’re eating? Most report nothing but a bland sweet. Now, let go of your nose and breathe through your nostrils again. Now there’s something. That’s how smell makes a difference in flavor. Pelchat conducted this experiment with Ruth Reichl, editor of the now-defunct Gourmet magazine, and Daniel Boulud, a well-lauded French chef in New York City, during an interview on WNYC radio in 2005. Her subjects wore clips over their noses as they put the unidentified flavors of jelly bean in their mouths. They chewed silently until, suddenly, they were instructed to remove the clips.
“Oh my God, amazing,” said Reichl in a low, distinctive voice. “It went from absolutely nothing to—the minute it came off, it was pure, devastatingly strong banana.”
“Think of fruit,” Pelchat said to me. By taste alone, fruit is sweet and sour, she explained, with the exception of bananas, which are solely sweet. “But we can distinguish lots and lots of different fruit flavors . We can distinguish the difference between peach and mango, apple and grape. Even more: we can distinguish between beef and lamb, the difference between a corn tortilla and a wheat tortilla. There are textural differences. But this is mostly smell.”
In the days after the accident, everything in my mouth, nose clip or not, was absolutely nothing. I felt wild and alone. It was only after I began to research anosmia that I discovered it wasn’t so rare. Everyone I talked to seemed to know someone who couldn’t smell. And some surprising names turned up in the mix.
I called Ben Cohen, half of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream Company, one afternoon. I had seen his name mentioned on various websites as I researched, unconfirmed rumors repeated frequently about his inability to smell. Was Cohen, who grinned behind a thick beard on the label of each pint of ice cream, truly an anosmic?
I could imagine. After all, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream is not simply about flavor. Full of more hunks of walnuts and pebbles of fudge than any other brand, they have the monopoly on texture.
I ate a lot of their ice cream after the accident. I relished the texture then, which gave an otherwise flatlining mouthful of cold sweet a structural oddity. The lumps and globs held my interest. They kept some notion of enjoyment alive. But it didn’t come as a surprise. I’ve known that pleasure since I was small, when I would excavate the knobbed rounds of cookie dough nestled within their pints with my spoon until there was nothing left but a puddle of sweet vanilla.
On summer vacation weekends spent up north, my family would drive to the original Ben and Jerry’s ice cream factory in Waterbury, Vermont. We would take their short, guided tour through the glass-encased mezzanine, past the production line and through rooms that smelled of baked cones and sugar. I watched the long rows of conveyor belts siphon pint carton after carton down toward packaging. My brother and I grabbed at the free samples, raising our hands to the air for Chubby Hubby, a malted vanilla cream swirled with fudge and chocolate-peanut pretzel chunks. In the factory “Scoop Shop” I always ordered my favorite: Half Baked, gritty with chunks of cookie dough and boulders of fudge brownie. I watched my father as
While at the Monell Chemical Senses Center I met Marcia Pelchat. She is a sensory psychologist who studies the science of flavor and food preference and often demonstrates the relationship between taste and smell with a jelly bean. Close your eyes and pick a jelly bean out of a bowl. Do it blindly, so you won’t know the flavor before you put it on your tongue. Pinch your nose shut, so you can only breathe out of your mouth, pop the bean in, and begin to chew. What can you taste? Can you tell what kind of jelly bean you’re eating? Most report nothing but a bland sweet. Now, let go of your nose and breathe through your nostrils again. Now there’s something. That’s how smell makes a difference in flavor. Pelchat conducted this experiment with Ruth Reichl, editor of the now-defunct Gourmet magazine, and Daniel Boulud, a well-lauded French chef in New York City, during an interview on WNYC radio in 2005. Her subjects wore clips over their noses as they put the unidentified flavors of jelly bean in their mouths. They chewed silently until, suddenly, they were instructed to remove the clips.
“Oh my God, amazing,” said Reichl in a low, distinctive voice. “It went from absolutely nothing to—the minute it came off, it was pure, devastatingly strong banana.”
“Think of fruit,” Pelchat said to me. By taste alone, fruit is sweet and sour, she explained, with the exception of bananas, which are solely sweet. “But we can distinguish lots and lots of different fruit flavors . We can distinguish the difference between peach and mango, apple and grape. Even more: we can distinguish between beef and lamb, the difference between a corn tortilla and a wheat tortilla. There are textural differences. But this is mostly smell.”
In the days after the accident, everything in my mouth, nose clip or not, was absolutely nothing. I felt wild and alone. It was only after I began to research anosmia that I discovered it wasn’t so rare. Everyone I talked to seemed to know someone who couldn’t smell. And some surprising names turned up in the mix.
I called Ben Cohen, half of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream Company, one afternoon. I had seen his name mentioned on various websites as I researched, unconfirmed rumors repeated frequently about his inability to smell. Was Cohen, who grinned behind a thick beard on the label of each pint of ice cream, truly an anosmic?
I could imagine. After all, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream is not simply about flavor. Full of more hunks of walnuts and pebbles of fudge than any other brand, they have the monopoly on texture.
I ate a lot of their ice cream after the accident. I relished the texture then, which gave an otherwise flatlining mouthful of cold sweet a structural oddity. The lumps and globs held my interest. They kept some notion of enjoyment alive. But it didn’t come as a surprise. I’ve known that pleasure since I was small, when I would excavate the knobbed rounds of cookie dough nestled within their pints with my spoon until there was nothing left but a puddle of sweet vanilla.
On summer vacation weekends spent up north, my family would drive to the original Ben and Jerry’s ice cream factory in Waterbury, Vermont. We would take their short, guided tour through the glass-encased mezzanine, past the production line and through rooms that smelled of baked cones and sugar. I watched the long rows of conveyor belts siphon pint carton after carton down toward packaging. My brother and I grabbed at the free samples, raising our hands to the air for Chubby Hubby, a malted vanilla cream swirled with fudge and chocolate-peanut pretzel chunks. In the factory “Scoop Shop” I always ordered my favorite: Half Baked, gritty with chunks of cookie dough and boulders of fudge brownie. I watched my father as
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