One of the side-effects of COVID-19 for many people was the loss of the sense of smell, which, of course, affected their sense of taste. Anosmia is the partial or full loss of smell: not being able to smell coffee or to enjoy the taste of curry was how one of my children knew for sure that he had succumbed to COVID-19 before the obligatory test had confirmed it. Other causes of anosmia could be from smoking, the side-effects of certain medication, or even having one’s nose blocked with mucus, such as when one has a bad cold. There is a definite link between smell and taste: tastes such as salty, bitter, sweet, and sour can be distinguished sans smell – the latter plays a strong role in our enjoyment (or rejection) of the flavours of other foods that we eat.
As a result of following a theme on senses during a stint of teaching at a pre-primary school many years ago, we provided samples of white substances on a ‘taste table’. These included cake flour, cornflour, salt, baking powder, mealie meal and castor sugar. While sight played a part in identifying these items, the young children had no real sense of the taste – despite sniffing the containers enthusiastically. A damp fingertip dipped into the containers soon sorted the ‘good’ from the ‘bad’ tasting items, with the sugar being loved by all. This exercise would probably be disallowed today because of concerns about health and hygiene … we took more chances in the 1980s. In another exercise, the children loved the smell of vanilla essence, which elicited all sorts of comments about ice-cream, icing and cake. That was until they were invited to taste the vanilla essence whilst holding their noses … yuck! It was while I was writing about the smell of apples yesterday that these memories came to mind.
Smell, scent, aroma … call it what you will (yes – stink too) … plays an important role in our enjoyment of food. So much so that our olfactory memories tend to remain strong. When you think about it, our olfactory memories have the ability to remember and recognize smells such as freshly mown grass, the tang of the sea, tomatoes, apples, cough mixture, or even the smell of a braai that can take one back decades to certain events in our lives or remind us of people from our past.
One of my granddaughters urged me not to ‘ever’ change my perfume “otherwise you won’t smell like Granny anymore.”
So, if you cannot taste food so well anymore because you can no longer smell it as well – or at all (the condition of anosmia seems to linger longer in some people than others), how can one make food seem enticing? We who take the smelling and tasting of food for granted, may not readily appreciate that enjoying food has also got to do with colour and texture.
Bear this in mind should you knowingly have a dinner guest suffering with anosmia by making a special effort to provide colourful food and a variety of textures.
Something Over Tea 