Ah! The whiff of freshly brewed coffee while lazing in bed.
Hmm..…the aroma of oven fresh cake.
Oof! The stink of garbage as you cross the garbage dump.
Oh no! The odour of leaking gas!
The olfactory sense is not one that gets much attention. It may not even
be considered an important one, in comparison to the rest. Yet, think about it…
lack of the smelling sense could take the fragrance out of our lives,
literally!
We can learn a lot by the smell of things, probably more than by the
visual or textural experience. Smells allow us an experience before it becomes
concrete and tangible. It could mean a safer or more pleasing or rather it can
help avoid an unpleasant experience. Red powder could be anything. But a single
sniff will warn you that it’s chilli powder without having to suffer its sting
on your tongue. Colourless toxic gases that have a smell can be sniffed out by
a lay person, in the absence of scientific tools. It’s not uncommon to have
people smell something burning, long before they find the source.
Often, we are led by our nose to sniff out danger long before we see or
feel it. What a catastrophe it would be if we couldn’t smell the gas leaking in
our kitchen! Or the bread burning in the oven! Or… (eeew) the queer smell of
food gone bad before you took a bite! Recent research studies are showing that fear
reactions can occur at the sensory level, even before the brain has had the
opportunity to interpret that the odour could mean trouble. No wonder that the
English language has an idiom, ‘to smell out danger’.
Think of your childhood. Most of our memories are accompanied by a particular
smell. Think of childhood and my thoughts are full of the light floral
fragrance of my mum’s talcum as I rested my head on her shoulder, the Old Spice
cologne when I snuggled up with my Dad, the peculiar comforting smell of my
nanny, the smell of earth as we entered my mother’s village… Sigh… the sweet
scent of memories. On the flip side, smells can bring back painful, fearful
memories too! For instance the smell of diesel fumes for a soldier or the smell
of smoke for a burns victim. Would memories be as intense in the absence of
smells?
I know a cook who knows just by the aroma whether the coffee has enough
sugar! Unbelievable but true! Skilled cooks rattle out ingredients in a dish
with just a sniff. Knowing whether a dish is ready by the aroma is one thing,
but to guess all the ingredients? Mind-blowing! Observe shoppers in the
marketplace. Many will sniff a fruit to know whether it is ready for
consumption. My Dad knows the variety of a mango and its ripeness with a whiff.
Now that’s one skill I have kind of developed by sniffing around with him! Does
that mean this is a skill we can refine with practice? Certainly. In the movie
‘The Hundred-Foot Journey’ it is interesting to watch how the protagonist’s
mother trains him to cook, with much focus on the olfactory sense, more than
any other.
How much do you enjoy your meals when you suffer a blocked nose during a
bout of the common cold? No smell means no taste. No matter how tasty the food,
for the one with a blocked nose, all the dishes taste one and the same – bland.
And of course, that means there is no joy in the eating.
A sense less talked about no doubt, but one that we can’t turn up our
nose at.
