Instinct and Smell

The sense of smell has always allowed all animals in the world to recognize from a distance the foods that meet their needs. It functions like a kind of ultrasensitive radar, capable of guiding behavior based on a few volatile molecules. Thus, animals don’t waste time wandering where they wouldn’t find anything edible, nor do they seek out food that isn’t suitable for them. Olfactory alliesthesia ensures an automatic selection of useful products, making those that are useless or harmful, like poisons, repulsive; it prevents the loss of energy either in a fruitless search or as a result of a sterile or dangerous obstruction of the digestive tract.

Can we humans derive the same advantages? We do so automatically to a certain extent: we reject food that smells too bad and seek out food that gives off a pleasant aroma. The mere smell of a succulent dish makes our mouths water…

Yet our sense of smell is clearly less sensitive than that of animals; in our culture, it occupies a poor relation compared to the other senses. Has it been dethroned by our intelligence? Since the neocortex allows us to solve all sorts of problems and ward off all sorts of dangers, we no longer need our noses to get us out of trouble, and the laws of natural selection have ultimately diminished its effectiveness.

This reasoning, while classic, is questionable. A more acute sense of smell could be very useful. We wouldn’t need police dogs to identify all sorts of crucial odors that completely escape our remaining olfactory sensitivity. Especially for our distant ancestors, who faced all sorts of situations without any detection or identification tools, the recognition of even the faintest odors could be vital.

The apathy of our nostrils could have another explanation: when a young child has their first experiences with food, they establish a whole network of connections between the smells of the foods they put in their mouth, their respective flavors, and more advanced reactions such as digestive problems, stomach cramps, and discomfort following ingestion. These daily experiences allow the child to structure their sense of smell, that is, to develop the numerous interneuronal connections that result in greater selectivity and sensitivity. The olfactory bulb comprises some 2,000 glomeruli, groups of cells seemingly specialized in an olfactory component: one can imagine the complexity of the neural network responsible for integrating their information. The proper development of this network and its connections with signals from the tongue and digestive tract can also determine olfactory sensitivity.

It is immediately apparent that the limited range of human smells can be explained by the failure of this learning process in the face of the processed foods that babies receive from weaning onward, or even from bottle-feeding. Culinary artifice, like the art of pastry-making and confectionery, produces random associations between odors and nutritional values, such that these associations do not respect the simple natural rules that the psyche is capable of integrating. Not to mention the toys, pacifiers, packaging, and other objects scented with artificial vanillin, strawberry, or who knows what other artificial aromas supposedly designed to make them more appealing. The connections that might be established will therefore be disordered, unrelated to the corresponding organic effects, and thus poorly influenced by the reward/punishment system linked to learning. Hence both the lack of coherence and the lack of sensitivity. Education reflects this deficiency and makes this learning even more precarious due to a lack of parental stimulation.

Empirically, it has been observed that simply smelling natural foods before eating them, paying attention to the subtleties of the perceived aromas, can gradually awaken unsuspected olfactory potential. Learning thus plays a compensatory role in adults; it is logical to assume that it would play a much more significant role in children. There may be a “sensitive period” during the first few months of life when this learning is programmed, after which it can no longer reach the same level of performance, as is the case with language: a child who hasn’t learned to speak before the age of twelve is unable to catch up and will only babble a rudimentary vocabulary. Similarly, we babble a few olfactory components, without our sense of smell being able to fully fulfill its role.

It should also be noted that the sense of smell is not genetically programmed for the aromas of prepared foods. For example, simply adding an appealing spice to any product, even one completely contrary to the body’s actual needs, is enough to make the dish appealing. A little thyme mixed with meat, even when the body is overloaded with protein, captivates the nostrils of diners and makes their mouths water. The instincto palette, made up of unprocessed foods, is the only one that restores the natural balance between food and nutritional needs.

Practice

Selecting foods by smell remains essential. Tasting several foods to find the most suitable one has a major drawback: the digestive system is activated by taste sensations, which reduces or complicates taste perceptions and can even disrupt digestion. It is therefore necessary to compensate for the sluggishness of our olfactory bulb with an appropriate technique.

The rule is as follows: start by identifying the smells of the different foods available. Experience shows that you need to smell them several times. A food that smells good is likely to be beneficial, but another may smell better and prove far more advantageous. If the latter better meets the body’s needs, the smell of the former will seem less pleasant on the second test. If you have, for example, ten or so fruits, you should start by smelling them all, one after the other, then repeat the process several times to eliminate those whose aroma has diminished, until you find the perfect one. This fruit will generally provide the range of nutrients best suited to your current needs, and therefore maximum satisfaction for your palate.

But be careful: it’s not the absolute attractiveness of each fruit that determines your need for it, but rather the variations in the quality and intensity of its specific aroma. A pomegranate, for example, always smells less strong than an orange. But it takes on a slightly floral scent when you need it, as opposed to its usual pungent odor. Although the intensity remains very low, to the point that you have to scratch the peel and clear your nostrils to perceive it, this reversal from unpleasant to pleasant is the key to knowing when it’s beneficial to your body or not. The taste shifts much more sharply from sweet and fruity to bland, acrid, and fibrous.

Therefore, learning is necessary, product by product, in order to build a kind of olfactory database and recognize which products should be taste-tested. This situation stems from the underdeveloped human sense of smell, largely due to a lack of stimulation by natural odors in early childhood.

Among the methods that can enhance odor perception, the following tips are worth noting:

The aroma of a natural food diminishes significantly or disappears once it’s been tasted, because once in the mouth, the sense of smell shifts its focus and works in conjunction with taste perception. The olfactory choice described above should therefore be made before putting the food in your mouth!

The alignment between nutritional intake and the body’s specific needs offers several major advantages: meeting requirements with minimal digestive energy expenditure; providing a combined intake of multiple substances that serve the same function; maximizing the impact on health processes; and reducing costs, as optimal intake is achieved with smaller quantities consumed. And the icing on the cake: maximum enjoyment, because you only eat the foods that best suit you! Choosing your menu based on your sense of smell is therefore a win-win situation.

Creating menus arbitrarily provides infinitely less gustatory satisfaction. The body that is forced to accept products that do not exactly correspond to its nutritional needs indicates its “dissatisfaction” through a mixed pleasure. Unfortunately, we often fail to realize that the frustration we feel from meal to meal stems from this fundamental oversight: that all living beings have always chosen their food primarily through olfactory attraction. Even protozoa gravitate towards substances useful for their metabolism and avoid others: this is known as chemotaxis. Our chemotaxis as multicellular organisms is concentrated in our sense of smell, and ingesting food not chosen by smell is a violation of a natural law as old as life itself.

This rule is essential to escape the slavery of cooking. Eating raw food provides more pleasure than cooked dishes, provided that the ingredients are chosen to meet the body’s needs. If we create our menus based on random memories or (often erroneous) dietetic considerations, the average level of enjoyment remains lower than the gastronomic level, hence the constant temptation to revert to old habits. Smell, therefore, is the key to escaping the culinary prison…

It may seem unusual, even inappropriate, to spend a few minutes smelling the available food instead of biting into the first piece of fruit we see. It’s not easy to fight against old habits; certain unconscious resistances can come into play. Recalling the laws of nature often seems trivial or tedious. But should we adhere to the rules of social life and habits developed within an artificial food context, or rather to the natural laws that can restore to our food its essential virtues: working towards our balance and health? Here we recognize the eternal nature-culture dilemma…