Take Time – Smell

by Meredith Spicher – Features Editor

This sounds like a very unpleasant topic; mostly because the word “smell” is commonly associated with the word “stink.” Think about the things in your everyday life that stink: the 3-day-old EasyMac on your desk, your roommate’s soccer cleats sitting in the corner of your room, the sweaty guy that sits beside you in Chemistry. But we, in a way, need those bad smells, without them, we would take all of the good smells for granted.

To me, smell and taste go hand-in-hand, maybe that’s just because I’m a foodie. Nonetheless, some of my favorite smells come from different foods: a freshly frosted cupcake, cinnamon, vanilla, chocolate chip cookies, I could go on, but I don’t want you to drool too much.  In her article Taste, Linda Richards says “The smell and texture of foods are also important contributing factors to how people perceive a food to taste and whether or not they like it… Since smell is much more sensitive to odors than taste is to flavors, people often first experience the flavor of a food by its odor.” So, clearly, it’s a fact that smell is a vital contributing factor in how foods taste.

I can’t imagine what life would be like without the ability to smell, even the bad smells. I think we need to embrace the bad smells, much like the bad situations in life. Without those bad situations, how would we be able to appreciate the good things in life? We need that contrast in our lives in order to be appreciative of the things that go well. So embrace the bad smells in life, you never know what will come of it.

Source: The Gale Encyclopedia of Nursing and Allied Health. Ed. Jacqueline L. Longe. Vol. 5. 2nd ed. Detroit: Gale, 2006. p2638-2641.

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