Odours of food

Good food and smell seem to be inextricably bound to one another.

When you walk down the street picking up the scent of freshly baked bread, fresh fruit and vegetables or a package of chips, you will find yourself longing to eat these things. You will feel an appetite for food.

Whether a food product is edible is usually determined by its odour. After all, burned or rotten food does not smell very good. However, this does not necessarily mean that everything that smells good also tastes good. For example, a rose smells lovely, but it does not taste very good.

The reversed effect can also take place. Many food products, such as fish and sea fruits, cheese and cabbage smell very bad during preparation, but they taste good all the same. Fresh fish does not stink, but when it has been lying around for a while or when fish garbage is present, you will experience a typical odour. Fungal cheeses can smell terribly like sweaty feet, but their taste can be very pleasant.

Whether people think something smell bad is very personal and culturally related. Not everybody likes brussles sprouts. And products that are experienced as tasty to some people, may smell terrible to people of another culture.

There is a saying that says 'you are what you eat'. There is one thing that is true about this; you will often smell like what you eat. You will not experience this yourself, because you are very used to your own smell. But when you are around people with a very different eating pattern you will quickly notice it through their odour. Dutch people often smell like cheese and people that eat a lot of garlic will smell very garlic-like. This way you can guess what somebody has been eating before you have even spoken to them about it.

Source: NRC Handelsblad (Dutch paper) of 28-6-03

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