Try this: Pinch your nose and take a sip of juice, or eat a jellybean. What flavor is it?
You probably won't be able to tell; most of what we call flavor in food actually comes from its aroma. And so the tragedy of Molly Birnbaum's anosmia—the loss of the sense of smell—is easy to grasp. A budding chef, she was about to enroll in a prestigious culinary school when nerve damage from a car accident wiped away her ability to smell. Her new book, "Season to Taste," is a chronicle of her journey to regain that sense. Written in lovely, lyrical language, it's also a fascinating exploration of the science of smell, from scent molecules to olfactory receptor theories to animals' perception of pheromones. Gilt Taste spoke recently with Molly about the emotional power of smell, flavor wizards in labs, and about the strange case of people who can only smell one thing.
Gilt Taste: So here you were, on the verge of starting a career in food, a career you knew was exactly what you wanted to do, and suddenly you lose the ability to smell. What was going through your mind?
Molly Birnbaum: In the aftermath of the accident, the most immediate and devastating result of not being about to smell was [the inability to perceive] flavor. But it becomes difficult in the long term because you arrive at all these big questions: "Where did my memories go? Where did my emotions go? What does that say about people I love? About familiar places like my childhood home? About smells that made me happy—like the beach or the smell of my child?" There are so many things that smelling helps us communicate or understand.
I was blown away about how much I didn't know about the sense of smell and how important it was to my life. I'm very lucky I recovered because most people don't.
What was it like, being able to smell something again for the first time?
It's one of my all time favorite moments in life (laughing). I was stunned. It was kind of like I was in a pitch black room and all of a sudden there was a light, and I had to shield my eyes from it. I didn't know what was going on, but suddenly I could smell rosemary. I've always loved rosemary—it's so pungent, earthy and warm. Now, it also carries emotional resonance for me. Whenever I smell it now, it really makes me happy.
You worked incredibly hard to fine-tune your nose after that first whiff of rosemary…
As soon as it was back, I realized I had the ability to improve my sense of smell and teach myself to smell small parts of a whole, the nuances. I learned to apply labels and language to smells the way master perfumers do, or the way chefs do—they've been in the kitchen for years and have this intrinsic knowledge of the taste and smells of every single one of their ingredients. I really was driven to work as hard as possible to recover and better my nose.
As a part of that work, you did a lot of research and field studies to understand the science of smell. What was the most shocking thing you discovered?
It's the fact that we don't all smell the same things in the same way. I smell the world differently than you, your mother, your boyfriend or daughter does. One of the most common examples of this is cilantro. Some of us, including me, love the smell and taste of cilantro. If I could add the herb to everything I ate today, I would! But others hate it—passionately so. To them, it smells and tastes like soap. There have been studies done to show that those who hate cilantro are in fact incapable of smelling certain notes in the aroma of cilantro—the notes that bring it from soapy to divine. There hasn't been too much work in this arena of smell. But if we smell one thing differently, I'm sure there are many more. It makes me stop and remember how subjective our world really is.
It's interesting that taste is so subjective, but part of it, too, has to be how people are exposed to flavors in the first place—if you've only ever had ripe strawberries from your mother's garden versus if you've only ever had strawberry-flavored candy. In the book there's a section about the time you spend at the Citromax flavor lab, where chemists mix and match chemicals to make flavors. What do you think of using chemicals to flavor and scent food?
Chemical flavors, like the ones produced at Citromax, have been part of the culinary landscape since the late-19th century. I grew up with the flavors made in labs—the taste of Dr. Pepper, of cinnamon gum, of peach iced tea. These are flavors that really remind me of being a kid. It was a shock for me to walk into the flavor lab and see—so concretely—that these familiar flavors came from vials, from raw chemical combinations, from scientists. I was as far as I could be from the source of "real" food, an eerie entry into something akin to Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.
Even though Willy Wonka is amazing, do you think factory-made flavors are a good thing?
I completely admit—I am fascinated by the process. Flavor chemists are like wizards, mixing and tasting and smelling these clear, uniform liquids and ending with a product that tastes like bubblegum, or peppermint, or what we imagine dragon fruit would be. I hadn't realized the extent to which creativity plays a roll in the formation of processed flavor. That said, however, after visiting the lab, I do think about the food that I put into my mouth, and the choices I make about what that is, in a much different way.
You also spent a lot of time at smell clinics observing and getting to know other patients who have lost their sense of smell. What were some notable cases?
At a clinic in Philadelphia, I met a man named Vito. He had lost his sense of smell after a nasty cold, which is actually one of the most common ways to lose one's sense of smell. But I learned it wasn't completely gone. He could smell only one thing. And he smelled it all the time.
That's wild. What was the only thing he could smell?
Vito said that it reminded him of his mother, and some scents came to my mind, ones that reminded me of my mother: lilac perfume, roast chicken, lemon-scented tea. But then Vito told me that his mother had died years before, and he was the first person to find her after she passed. It was that smell, the smell of death, that haunted him years later.
Phantom smells like Vito's are common in people who have anosmia. Unfortunately, they're often unpleasant. But Vito's seemed to me to be the worst. He had a hard time eating, being in crowds, even attending family events. He wondered what it all meant. Why did he smell the scent of death? Smell and its aberrations were a painful mystery.
Has he recovered?
I'm happy to report that today, years later, Vito has recovered. The smell of death eventually faded and was eventually replaced by pleasant aromas, ones that exist in concrete reality. But I'm sure he'll never forget that experience.
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