This has happened because we have stopped using our sense of smell. We use sight for spreadsheets, and hearing to have meetings, but in our safe and healthy world smell is not crucial. Besides, those of us who live in a city are surrounded by mostly unpleasant odours: of course we would rather avoid them altogether.
The authors of a study on smell, Aroma,9 argue that smell destroys the illusion that each of us is a separate entity, with clearly cut boundaries separating us from each other. To smell a person, or an animal, is to know them intimately, to a degree that we are uncomfortable with. To smell skin is almost to touch it, to feel close to the animal reality of our fellow human beings; smell is scandalous. Our society, terrified of intimacy as it is, would rather do without it. And yet smell stubbornly exists, and it connects us to invisible realms.
We have seen how difficult it is to speak of the numinous, or to describe it, but smells are not words, and the numinous can manifest itself through them. In ancient Egypt, a type of incense called kyphi was sacred to the Sun, and was burned as an offering. There were different recipes for making kyphi, some of which were considered important enough to be inscribed in stone in temples. The use of incense and the pungent smoke it produces for spiritual ends is still widespread: I spent my childhood in a Catholic country, and although I was bored by the mass on Sundays, I was thrilled by the smell of frankincense that accompanied its celebration. It gave me a sign, at least, that a numinous experience might be possible.
In the tradition of grimoires – textbooks of magic containing, among other spells, instructions for the summoning of spirits – incense played a key role. Practitioners of this kind of magic still burn specific mixtures of gums, resins, oils, herbs and wood, in a triangle drawn on the floor, where the spirit they are conjuring is supposed to appear. The spirit uses the pungent-smelling smoke to fashion a shape for itself.
But why would a spirit need a visible shape? A spirit scented can be as real as a spirit seen. The numinous experience is impossible to put into words, so the magician resorts to a visual metaphor to describe it, as Charles Foster had to do when he tried to live like a badger.
The Chewong, a tribe of the Malay peninsula, have no such qualms. They burn perfumed wood for the spirits every night; this ritual feeds the spirits, and must never be neglected. When a shaman calls up a class of spirits called ‘leaf-people’, they come carrying a sweet fragrance with them, and although only the shaman can see the leaf-people, everybody can smell them. Their smell is so sweet that it might cause you to weep tears of joy.10
Smells can provoke tears in other contexts, also. It is devastating to inhale the scent left on a pillow by a departed lover. Suddenly that person is there with you again; if you close your eyes, you can feel his presence, absolutely real. You can sense the bulge on the bed where he used to lie, the gentle warmth of his body. And when you open your eyes, and he is not there, you feel betrayed by the diminished reality in which you live.
By defining scent only as an absence, we are renouncing endless possibilities of wonder. Sight and hearing are certainly more useful in terms of our physical survival, but to reject your sense of smell because of that is like cutting off your left arm because the right one is all you need to change the channel on the TV.
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The trajectory of taste is a cautionary tale. As the animals we are, we need food to survive. Gradually we discovered that some foods taste better cooked; then, that particular combinations of flavours are especially pleasing; then we learned that we could record those combinations in the form of recipes. In terms of strict necessity, we only needed food, and maybe some rudimentary cooking to make food safer. The next steps were exquisitely useless: they were driven by our desire to broaden our spectrum of experience and make our world vaster. Our sense of taste followed and nourished our sense of wonder, and what started as fuel became a source of pleasure. Then, unfortunately, there came a time when, under the weight of disenchantment, we reverted to using food almost exclusively as fuel again, and today we have better things to do than cook, or take time to eat. My own life has followed a similar trajectory.
Some of my fondest childhood memories are infused with flavours. Italy is perhaps unique in its variety of regional produce and recipes: a tourist from Rome could visit Puglia for a week and every day sample a dish she had never even heard of before. Some local flavours – the bitterness of certain mushrooms, for example, or the deliciously rotten tang of ricotta shcante – are too much for those who have not grown up with them.
A regular summer breakfast in my family entails pane e pomodoro (crusty bread with the juice of tomatoes squeezed directly on it, a drizzle of olive oil, and a pinch of salt), fruit just picked from the trees in the garden (apricots, peaches or figs, depending on how late in the season it is), milk, coffee, warm focaccia and croissants, and biscuits. Cured meat is often on the table as well – especially prosciutto crudo and mortadella. A lot of flavours come together at our small table, from the sweetness of tomatoes to the chocolate in the biscuits, from the sharpness of coffee to the wholesome freshness of milk. I like to alternate between savoury and sweet flavours, from a bite of pane e pomodoro to a juicy peach, while others are more conservative, and move methodically from a savoury start to a sweet ending. The one thing everybody agrees on is that figs wrapped in prosciutto are divine; some make sandwiches with them, to take to the beach.
I wouldn’t say there is a food culture in southern Italy as much as that southern Italy is a food culture, where flavour matters almost as much as family, and, in practice, more than religion. It is entirely normal for friends to debate the quality of the varieties of olive oil produced that year, and how they compare with those of the previous crop. Do you prefer a stronger, more piquant note, that tickles your throat in a pleasant way, or are you one for mellow sweetness?
Italians regularly converse about other food while they are eating, exchanging ideas on all the dishes they are going to try in the next few days, or memories of those they tried recently, or that they used to eat in the past. It is the sensuous equivalent of the free association technique championed by Sigmund Freud, in which patients give their memory and imagination free rein. Certain flavours remind you of other flavours, and you let your senses lead you down memory lane, or into the future.
For good eating, mindset is as important as produce. London, in theory, is food heaven. I can jump from my favourite Chinese restaurant, which does real Chinese food and sits discreetly in a garish tourist area, to a place where I can get good chips and fresh fish deep-fried in a light batter, to the Turkish restaurant in Brockley that initiated me into the forbidden delights of lamb and yogurt conjoined. This abundance of food, however, does not translate into an abundance of pleasure.
In London, lunch is all too often a sandwich or other fast food bought in a supermarket or chain restaurant, utterly bland garbage. In the evening, we eat watching television, and we barely notice what we are putting into our mouths. Even when we visit a good restaurant, we eat quickly, because the next customers need the table, or because we have more activities to squeeze into our scarce free time.