Bad Taste
So I was going to write a manifesto of sorts, an analogy to dating, about how it’s wise for individuals to be as open to eating different foods as possible, but that the picky are hurting only themselves. (On this topic, see Irina Dumitrescu.) Someone insists they can’t eat gluten but maybe they actually can? This is their loss.
That and: there’s this weird assumption that the merely picky (or, whispers, dieting) are somehow doing this grave injustice to people with genuine medical reasons to avoid whichever food. It’s one of those things that feels true but doesn’t add up. I guess it’s a crying-wolf concern, that people who claim an allergy to a food they merely dislike make people take allergies less seriously. Maybe? Or: a relatively large number of people avoiding ingredients unnecessarily can raise awareness (and more to the point, availability of) products whose ingredients are clearly labeled. That and! The same people who must avoid certain foods are also… people in the world, who may have whichever other idiosyncratic, cultural, ethical, aesthetic, religious, etc etc reasons for avoiding still others. It’s not like there are two groups of people, the ones with the real medical concerns, and the ones who think mushrooms are gross.
And: there’s apparently a culture-wars contrarian stance that conflates anaphylactic food allergies with snowflake-ness. I guess some people, even otherwise intelligent ones, are just idiots, what can be done.
So that was going to be the post. The newsletter. Whatever. Instead I feel compelled to mention the thing where I got up one morning, asked my husband if I should make coffee, and he was like, I already made coffee, and I put together that the reason I hadn’t known this was that… I could not smell it. I couldn’t smell diapers or the diaper garbage pail, either, which sounds good but when paired with not being able to smell anything is not ideal. I am writing this in optimistic past tense, as things on the olifactory front are improving but not yet 100%. Some people NEVER regain their sense of smell, you learn when you google it.
Maybe it’s Covid, you’re thinking, and you know what? It was, and I had already known I had it for a few days when this happened, but thought that it wasn’t an Omicron symptom, or that I’d been spared, or who knows. It is however traumatic when it happens. Yes, the famous trauma, I think it may count here, maybe, probably not. (There is a war going on. Meanwhile I can’t smell poop as well as I once could.) But I’m someone who usually has a keen, maybe too keen, sense of smell. It was even a party trick: friends had me smell various jelly beans and I could identify all the flavors. I can’t go to the movies without getting a migraineish thing because the smell of artificial butter popcorn makes me ill. I’m the person asking, “what’s that smell?” for good and bad ones alike. I am in fact a beagle.
After falling asleep to a few “Ted Lasso” eps I googled actor Jason Sudeikis. Did you know that he’s the nephew of Norm from “Cheers” (can’t unsee it) and that he was born without a sense of smell?
I am also, maybe, a supertaster. I think. Is that where you reallllly like delicious foods but are especially put off by ones you’re not into? Because I cannot be in the room with ranch-flavored anything. (A silver lining of isolation, these things never coming up.) And my sense of taste weirdly did not go away, or not entirely. Coffee turned into hot water, cheese into a less complex version of cheese, granny smith apples remained unchanged.
I never thought this would happen but I could tell a diaper needed changing this morning before seeing that it did and I was so so pleased.