Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good by Barb Stuckey
Authors: Barb Stuckey
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spices.
This is the power of aroma: the ability to make a grown woman stick her head into a trash can and tear up. Smell can move us in this way because of our anatomy: olfaction is the only sense that does not first pass through the brain’s sensory switchboard, the thalamus. It essentially shortcuts its way straight to the boss man without having to deal with his minions. A very powerful sense, indeed.
The first time a signal from a smell reaches your brain, it etches a signature into your memory. I experienced what I call a Fragrant Flashback standing over that trash can of spices. A wonderful scene in Disney’s Ratatouille also illustrates this concept when the most wonderfully named food critic, Anton Ego, digs into a dish of chef Remi’s piping hot vegetable ratatouille and is instantly transported back to his childhood. This is not because childhood is where we encode our smell memories, but because Ego was a child when he first experienced ratatouille and I was a child when I first smelled the aroma of dozens of spices mingled together. If you smell ratatouille for the first time at age thirty-seven, you will connect it to that thirty-seven-year-old period of your life the next time you smell it. Smell memory is so strong it can take you back to the first time youexperienced a food. It just so happens that we experience most food for the first time when we’re young.
Personal history, culture, and learning determine our smell preferences. Linda Bartoshuk says that our sense of smell acts as an emotional sponge:
If you sniff an odor and some predator takes a bite out of you, you’re going to learn that predator is bad news. Even better, you eat something with an odor, now if you get calories from the food that odor was in: wow! That food is registered in your brain as something very good for you. Something bad happens to you, the olfactory signal is disgusting to you; something good happens to you, you love that smell.
This concept is called conditioned preference or conditioned aversion. You are conditioned to like or dislike a food in part by your experiences that accompany ingestion of it. It’s also similar to the response Pavlov was able to condition in his dogs. The dogs associated the sound of a bell with being fed. Eventually the bell, alone, could make them salivate.
But even if you and your blood sibling grew up in the same ratatouille-eating household, this doesn’t mean that you’ll both have the same reaction to the dish’s aroma. In addition to our personal histories, our sense of smell is as much as matter of genes (or nature) as it is how we’re brought up (or nurtured). Our genes determine how intensely we can smell things in the same way that they make some of us HyperTasters and some Tolerant Tasters.
Some people are genetically predisposed to specific anosmias: the inability to smell a specific compound, or smell-blindness. A few of these are widely known—for example, after eating asparagus, many people notice that their urine has a strong odor that is somewhat vegetal, sulfurous, petroleum-like, and tinny. Others are completely oblivious to this smell. Almost everyone who eats asparagus produces urine with an “off” odor, but if you’re lucky, you’re smell-blind to it. This phenomenon exists for many other odorous compounds as well.
Nose-Smelling Versus Mouth-Smelling
Now head of a lab at Monell Chemical Senses Center, Johan Lundström was born and raised in Sweden. He was always intrigued with smells, but it was his pet German shepherd, Ella, who was responsible for his professional path towardolfaction. On walks, Lundström noticed that Ella would detect other dogs’ urine in places where he could not smell a thing. He knew that dogs have a more acute sense of smell than humans, but he was particularly interested in her behavior after she’d smelled another dog’s output. Sometimes her tail would go wild; sometimes she’d get anxious; at other times she’d be
This is the power of aroma: the ability to make a grown woman stick her head into a trash can and tear up. Smell can move us in this way because of our anatomy: olfaction is the only sense that does not first pass through the brain’s sensory switchboard, the thalamus. It essentially shortcuts its way straight to the boss man without having to deal with his minions. A very powerful sense, indeed.
The first time a signal from a smell reaches your brain, it etches a signature into your memory. I experienced what I call a Fragrant Flashback standing over that trash can of spices. A wonderful scene in Disney’s Ratatouille also illustrates this concept when the most wonderfully named food critic, Anton Ego, digs into a dish of chef Remi’s piping hot vegetable ratatouille and is instantly transported back to his childhood. This is not because childhood is where we encode our smell memories, but because Ego was a child when he first experienced ratatouille and I was a child when I first smelled the aroma of dozens of spices mingled together. If you smell ratatouille for the first time at age thirty-seven, you will connect it to that thirty-seven-year-old period of your life the next time you smell it. Smell memory is so strong it can take you back to the first time youexperienced a food. It just so happens that we experience most food for the first time when we’re young.
Personal history, culture, and learning determine our smell preferences. Linda Bartoshuk says that our sense of smell acts as an emotional sponge:
If you sniff an odor and some predator takes a bite out of you, you’re going to learn that predator is bad news. Even better, you eat something with an odor, now if you get calories from the food that odor was in: wow! That food is registered in your brain as something very good for you. Something bad happens to you, the olfactory signal is disgusting to you; something good happens to you, you love that smell.
This concept is called conditioned preference or conditioned aversion. You are conditioned to like or dislike a food in part by your experiences that accompany ingestion of it. It’s also similar to the response Pavlov was able to condition in his dogs. The dogs associated the sound of a bell with being fed. Eventually the bell, alone, could make them salivate.
But even if you and your blood sibling grew up in the same ratatouille-eating household, this doesn’t mean that you’ll both have the same reaction to the dish’s aroma. In addition to our personal histories, our sense of smell is as much as matter of genes (or nature) as it is how we’re brought up (or nurtured). Our genes determine how intensely we can smell things in the same way that they make some of us HyperTasters and some Tolerant Tasters.
Some people are genetically predisposed to specific anosmias: the inability to smell a specific compound, or smell-blindness. A few of these are widely known—for example, after eating asparagus, many people notice that their urine has a strong odor that is somewhat vegetal, sulfurous, petroleum-like, and tinny. Others are completely oblivious to this smell. Almost everyone who eats asparagus produces urine with an “off” odor, but if you’re lucky, you’re smell-blind to it. This phenomenon exists for many other odorous compounds as well.
Nose-Smelling Versus Mouth-Smelling
Now head of a lab at Monell Chemical Senses Center, Johan Lundström was born and raised in Sweden. He was always intrigued with smells, but it was his pet German shepherd, Ella, who was responsible for his professional path towardolfaction. On walks, Lundström noticed that Ella would detect other dogs’ urine in places where he could not smell a thing. He knew that dogs have a more acute sense of smell than humans, but he was particularly interested in her behavior after she’d smelled another dog’s output. Sometimes her tail would go wild; sometimes she’d get anxious; at other times she’d be
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