![\"smelling](\"http:\/\/www.theteatable.com\/images\/smelling-tea-leaves.jpg\" "\\"smelling")
Can anything be more disappointing than not being able to enjoy your favorite food when you’re clogged up with a cold?\u00a0 In this second part of my series about taste, I’d like to talk about the importance of our sense of smell as it relates to perceiving taste.\u00a0 (Here is part one<\/a>, if you missed it.)\u00a0 When you stop and experiment a bit with tasting and smelling, it really is amazing how crucial aroma is.\u00a0 Not only does it greatly enhance our ability to taste, but it is also linked with memory and emotion such that it can create a truly unique experience for each person.<\/p>\nHere are some interesting facts about smell:<\/p>\n
- \n
- Humans can distinguish among at least 1,000 different odorants.<\/li>\n
- Highly trained people, such as perfumers, can distinguish up to 10,000!<\/li>\n
- There are two kinds of smelling: orthonasal<\/strong> (sniffing) and retronasal<\/strong> (via the back of the throat).\u00a0 Different parts of the brain are activated by each of these mechanisms.<\/li>\n
- Try an experiment.\u00a0 Taste two red jelly beans, one cherry and one strawberry, with your nose pinched.\u00a0 You can tell they’re sweet, but you can’t identify the fruit flavor until you open your nose.\u00a0 That’s retronasal smelling.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Smell tells us three important things about what we’re eating:<\/p>\n
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- It helps us identify the substance<\/strong> (is it tea or coffee?).<\/li>\n
- it triggers our memory<\/strong> so we know whether we’ve had it before and what that experience was like.<\/li>\n
- and it triggers an emotional response <\/strong>to the food (is it disgusting?).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
All of these can play into our taste preferences, even if we don’t realize it.\u00a0 If an odor is associated with something unpleasant, it can be very difficult to enjoy whatever foods have that aroma.\u00a0 If you’ve ever had food poisoning, you know that just the merest whiff of that food, or any others you ate along with it, will make you queasy.\u00a0 (I’ll spare you my olive story . . .)\u00a0 Luckily, tea is one of those foods that often has very pleasant memories associated with it.\u00a0 I’ve had many customers talk about memories of having tea with their grandmother when they were a child, or things of that nature, such that tea really gives them a “warm and fuzzy” feeling.<\/p>\n
In our workshop on taste at The Tea Expo, we were asked to smell 14 bottled aromas (very concentrated) and identify them from a list of possibilities.\u00a0 All 14 were aromas common to unflavored tea, such as lavender, walnut, honey, malt, etc.\u00a0 We were also supposed to rank how familiar the smell was, how intense it was, whether we liked it or not, and what tea it reminded us of.\u00a0 You could say I really stunk at this task, which surprised and disappointed me.\u00a0 Many people have told me what a good sense of smell I have.\u00a0 Nevertheless, I only got 5 of the 14 correct.\u00a0 (I took some solace in the fact that the gal sitting next to me only got 2 right.)\u00a0 I also rationalized that “seaweed” isn’t really a familiar smell to me, so naturally I got that one wrong.\u00a0 But I was absolutely blown away that I missed “vanilla,” which I use all the time and consider one of my favorite aromas and flavors.\u00a0 Once I had all the answers I smelled again the ones I had missed, and while some seemed painfully obvious once I knew what they were, some just didn’t register.\u00a0 At the time, all I could think was that the aromas were so very concentrated that they just didn’t seem familiar.\u00a0 Another possible cause is that the aromas were totally out of context (which I suppose is part of the point in testing your sense of smell).\u00a0 It was just a little plain bottle, rather than a piece of fruit, for example.\u00a0 You see a piece of fruit and you have an expectation of how it should probably smell.\u00a0 You approach a little bottle, and it doesn’t give you any visual cues.\u00a0 Research has shown that aromas seem more familiar when they are paired with an appropriate taste.\u00a0 For example, vanilla paired with a sweet taste is familiar, but when paired with a salty taste seems unfamiliar (reference<\/a>).<\/p>\n
While most people don’t have these purified samples sitting around to practice with, we do certainly have smells all over the place that are easy to get our noses into.\u00a0 Smell fruits and vegetables, the dirt,\u00a0 flowers and other plants, nuts, and food extracts.\u00a0 Then smell your tea and see if you notice anything.\u00a0 Smell the dry leaves, the brewed liquid, and of course, focus on the retronasal sense as you swallow.\u00a0 When you sip your tea, make sure it is not too hot and aerate the liquid by slurping.\u00a0 This will help bring the aroma molecules to the olfactory nerve endings in the roof of the nose.\u00a0 And pay attention to not just the taste and smell, but also to the feelings and memories that may come to you as you sip.\u00a0 It’s very easy to miss these if you’re doing anything else at the same time, so try to quiet your mind a bit and slow down.<\/p>\n
Next time, we’ll discuss the trigeminal system, which is what gives us a sense of the mouth-feel of a food or beverage (think spicy hot peppers or cool mint).\u00a0 And by all means, feel free to comment here about your own experiences and opinions.<\/p>\n
References:<\/p>\n
- Cupping: Sensory Skill Building Workshop, by Scott Svihula, World Tea Expo 2011.<\/li>\n
- www.tastescience.org<\/a><\/li>\n
- http:\/\/www.webmd.com\/diet\/features\/science-how-we-taste<\/a><\/li>\n
- http:\/\/www.gourmet.com\/magazine\/2000s\/2008\/07\/scienceofflavor<\/a><\/li>\n
- Experience-dependent neural integration of taste and smell in the human brain<\/a><\/li>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Lori Way, MS, RD Can anything be more disappointing than not being able to enjoy your favorite food when you’re clogged up with a cold?\u00a0 In this second part of my series about taste, I’d like to talk about the importance of our sense of smell as it relates to perceiving taste.\u00a0 (Here is… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":54,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theteatable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/995"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theteatable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theteatable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theteatable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/54"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theteatable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.theteatable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/995\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theteatable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theteatable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theteatable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
- it triggers our memory<\/strong> so we know whether we’ve had it before and what that experience was like.<\/li>\n
- Try an experiment.\u00a0 Taste two red jelly beans, one cherry and one strawberry, with your nose pinched.\u00a0 You can tell they’re sweet, but you can’t identify the fruit flavor until you open your nose.\u00a0 That’s retronasal smelling.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n