If You Can’t Smell, You Don’t Know Beans

As Whiff-afficianados know by now, the taste buds of human beings can identify only 5 basic sensations: sweet, sour, bitter, salty and savory. All more subtle shades of taste are actually flavors, a co-mingling of those 5 recognizable tastes with the over-10,000 smells recognizable to humans.

In fact, as we learned in Olfactory Fact #21, an experiment by The Food Network’s popular Food Detectives blindfolded and nose-clipped a four-man panel of tasters, and discovered that the subjects were unable to distinguish between the flavors of peach and mango, coconut and cherry jelly beans, or apple and raw potato.

Here’s a nifty little experiment you can perform for yourself. Just pinch your nose closed while eating a jelly bean. The flavor of the jelly bean is reduced to a simple slightly sweet sensation in the mouth. As soon as you release your nose while still chewing on the jelly bean, you’ll get a sudden rush of flavor, demonstrating how flavorless life would be if we actually depended on taste alone to appreciate the food we enjoy.

More Scents & the City

When a group of researchers at Rockefeller University recently initiated a 5-year study to investigate how people process olfactory sensations and thus create a “smell demography” of the Big Apple, we knew that New York was a city with an uncommon appreciation for Good Scents. Thanks to the Pratt Manhattan Gallery, you can get your nose in on the action. You Are Here: Mapping the Psychogeography of New York City is an exhibition of work by contemporary artists geared to map the emotional terrain of the City.

Guest-curated by Katharine Harmon, author of The Map as Art, the exhibition includes a wealth of inventive conceptual works such as a 3-D Jell-O map of the Manhattan skyline, an anxiety map of the five boroughs lit by sweat-powered batteries, and Nicola Twilley’s scratch-and-sniff map of the City. “I like wondering whether the world’s most adrenalized and artistic city elicits more emotional responses than others,” says Harmon. “Mapping is an intriguing way to approach the question, especially at a time when artists are using mapping concepts in such ingenious ways.”

The exhibit opens on Friday, September 24 and runs through November 6.

Smells Like a Party!

For the six million visitors to beer tents across Germany celebrating the 200th Anniversary of Oktoberfest, Hubert Hackl may prove an unlikely hero.

The problem began when Bavaria banned smoking in all pubs, cafes, and yes - beer tents - only to realize that the cigarette smoke smelled a whole lot better than the cuisine and the patrons. The noxious blend of body odor, spoiled food and stale beer in the notoriously poorly-ventilated beer halls which had previously been masked by the smell of smoke has proven to be an ironic and unfortunate side-effect of the trend toward “indoor clean air.”

Enter Hubert Hackl, who is tackling the smelly conundrum with a stench-eating bacteria. The concoction, a brownish liquid created from fermenting a mixture of compost, seaweed and molasses, is designed to be spread across the floorboards of the beer halls where it will presumably travel the same route as spilled beer, seeping between the planks and into the soil. What remains is “a natural fertilizer for grass growing back in the spring,” says Hackl, who has been supplying detergents and other cleaning products to the beer festival for 28 years. “This is the most natural way of treating organic waste.”

Friedrich Steinberg, manager of the famous Hofbrau which was the first beer hall to test the substance in 2008, is sold on Hackl’s odor-eating cocktail. Not only is the air much more pleasant at the counters, where Steinberg says odors tend to accumulate, “things are much better in the toilets too.”

China Takes Aim at Stinky Landfills

In a city where 17.6 million residents produce 18,400 tons of household garbage daily - and which inexplicably recycles only 4% of its garbage - officials are literally bringing out the big guns.

In an attempt to counterattack the exploding stench of its overflowing landfills, one hundred giant truck-mounted deodorizing cannons with a maximum range of 164 feet are taking aim at the Gao’antun Garbage Landfill Plant in Beijing’s suburbs, which has been blanketing the city with odor and offending local noses. “At night we all wake up coughing,” says Geng Haiou. “Even when you are sleeping soundly, you can wake up coughing. Everyone opens their windows in the summer and there is that smell.”

The good news is that municipal officials consider the use of the smellitzer-cannons a temporary fix. The bad news is that municipal officials’ idea of a long-term fix is to cover the dump sites with heavier layers of plastic.

Olfactory Adventures in London

We go to galleries to feast our eyes and concerts to feast our ears, so what about our poor culturally-deprived noses?

Scratch & Sniff Events, “Purveyors of Olfactory Adventures,” are introducing a new kind of event that’s a museum for your nose. Hosted by fragrance enthusiast Odette Toilette, the events have been set to introduce more creative ways of responding to that most neglected of senses, our sense of smell.

“Smell is incredibly powerful, especially as a way of vividly recalling memories, but it’s quite a hard thing to talk about and is rather clouded in mystery,” says Odette. “We’re aiming to make fragrance appreciation enjoyable, accessible, and provocative. Rather than traditional formats of perfume appreciation which are based on being able to identify ‘notes,’ we’re using more inventive formats to get people enjoying smell by crossing it over with all sorts of things: social and historic themes, cultural ideas, and other art forms.”

Upcoming events, scheduled for the fourth Tuesday of each month at The Book Club in London, include:

September: The Scent of the 1920s
October: Scent in the Movies
November: Scent and Creativity
January: Around the World Through Smell
February: Male Identity and Scent

Got Garlic Breath?

Whether you’re scent marketing a product, an experience, or yourself - it’s not just about using what works, but also about eliminating what doesn’t. Garlic, for example. Anybody who loves anybody who loves garlic will tell you that it’s a decidedly unlovely signature scent, and a nearly-possible one to mask. The persistence of garlic-stink, not just on the breath but through the pores, is due to a compound called allyl methyl sulphide (AMS) which cannot be broken down during digestion, and is so released from the body through breath and sweat. Even brushing your teeth and scrubbing with deodorant soap are no cure.

Fortunately, food scientists at Ohio State University have found an antidote that’s spectacular in its simplicity. In short - Got Milk?

In tests with raw and cooked cloves, milk was shown to significantly reduce concentrations of AMS. Full-fat milk provided better results than skimmed, according to breath samples taken from a volunteer given chopped cloves to eat during the experiments. It is thought that milk fat suppresses the sulphurous properties of garlic.

“The best results would be obtained if diners drank milk with their meal, rather than afterwards,” says Professor Sheryl Barringer, who carried out the study. “This will enhance the deodorizing effect and mask the odor of garlic flavour during eating.”

There are other foods which are thought to limit garlic breath. They include prunes, basil, aubergine and some varieties of mushroom - but milk was better at masking the volatile compounds responsible for the smell.

However, the researchers warn that it might be wise not to go overboard on the dairy products. There are many anecdotal reports from Japanese and Chinese visitors to the UK that Britons smell of ’sour milk’ due to their calcium-rich diets.

“If you can smell it, we can sell it!”

Electricity, vehicles and functioning technology are virtually non-existent in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of Mad Max - non-existent, that is, outside the seedy community of Bartertown, where Tina Turner’s minions have stumbled upon a seemingly-oxymoronic “clean” renewable energy source in the methane from pig feces.

The harvesting of methane from waste is not just cinematic fantasy, as it turns out. A landfill in Fargo, North Dakota is turning trash into cash in a way that would’ve made Auntie Entity stand up and take notice. When complaints from nearby residents prompted city officials to design a system for burning off the stinky methane generated by decomposing garbage at the city’s landfill site, officials at a nearby Cargill oilseed processing plant had other ideas - Why waste the potent gas by burning it off when it can instead be harnessed?

Last year alone, the methane gas that was formerly escaping into the atmosphere and noses of nearby residents generated almost $2 million for the city. Enough, says Fargo city commissioner Mike Williams, that the city did not have to raise property taxes on its residents. “If you can smell it we can sell it,” says Williams. “That which used to just be right under our nose turned into cash and new energies.”

Colbert’s Scratch ‘n’ Sniff Bible

Noting the Pope’s non-traditional new baseball cap headgear, Stephen Colbert reported last week that “the church is building on the momentum of the new Pope-Cap with additional youth outreach strategies,” such as the launch of CatholicTV.com - a Boston-based 3-D internet site designed to “change the church’s stuffy image.”

“You might want to expand your arsenal of youth-oriented gimmicks,” suggests Colbert, who is always thinking one step ahead (it was Colbert who echoed Whiff-Guy C. Russell Brumfield’s notion of Scented Money, allowing the blind to differentiate between denominations). “Might I recommend a Scratch ‘n’ Sniff Bible?”

Okay, he’s joking…but if any savvy Bible-binders pick up on the idea, we hope they’ll consult the Whiff-Guys for the particulars. We’ve got fragrance suggestions for every scene from the Garden of Eden (fresh!) to Noah’s Ark (not-so-fresh!) and…yes, Stephen…we concur that Lazarus probably would smell “a little ripe.”

Sharing Olfactory Moments

“How significant are the moments in your life? Do you take the time to live in your moments? Do you just go about aimlessly, taking your senses for granted?”

This is just one of those cool quirky ideas that deserves a whiff and a nod. Observing the definition of olfactory (”…of, relating to, or contributing to the sense of smell”) and the definition of moment (”…a particular period of importance, influence, or significance…”), the Smells Good Spa encourages readers to click over to The Olfactory Moment and share an aroma they experienced over the weekend along with the memories it recreated (a phenomenon known to Whiff-readers as Endorphin Branding™).

Whether checking out the Olfactory Moments of others (such as Harlem_Minded, who correctly identifies Compost as a memorable scent) or telling your own smell tale, it’s a fun and clever way to get in touch with that most over-emotional yet under-rated of senses.

Honorary Whiff-Guy

Men’s scented body wash: It’s not just for metrosexuals anymore, thanks to the debonair Isaiah Mustafa, whose cheesy commercials as the looks-so-hot-smells-so-cool Old Spice-Guy have done for marketing scent what the Whiff-Guys have done for scent marketing.

“Hello ladies. Look at your man, now back to me. Now back to your man, now back to me,” says a towel-clad Mustafa in a voice dripping testosterone ala Barry White. “Sadly he isn’t me, but if he stopped using lady-scented body wash and switched to Old Spice, he could smell like he’s me.”

Mustafa debuted as The Man Your Man Could Smell Like during the Super Bowl touting the slogan, “Smell like a man, man,” after Procter & Gamble discovered that women purchase approximately 70% of the shower gel for men in their households. More recently, he went viral with an equally hilarious series of personal videos to everyone from Demi Moore and Rose McGowan to President Obama and the Huffington Post. But if you’re not one of the 180+ “fans” who have so-far received a one-to-one message, you probably shouldn’t hold your breath.

“I am just one ridiculously handsome man,” announced the Old Spice-Guy last week. “I can’t write to everyone.”

Next Page »