Friday, November 26, 2004
The Scent of the Holidays
Smell is the most evocative of senses, sending signals to the limbic system, that most ancient and least articulate part of the brain, and the seat of emotion and memory.
This holiday weekend, prodigal Michianans have been gathered back to ancestral hearths by the savoury summons of roasting turkey and spicy promises of pumpkin pie. Bypassing reason, those smells condense the memories of previous family gatherings into one pungent command to return and repeat the rituals of cinnamon, sage and caramelized sugar.
We live in a world of olfactory overload, from the cab driver’s eye-watering pine freshener, to the co-worker’s aromatherapy vaporiser, that sends rank tendrils of essential oils through the air-ducts like a B-movie alien. Trading on the wordless eloquence of smell, realtors spray houses they’re showing with fake baking aromas, for an instantly homey feel, and exiting office cleaners shoot a burst of lemon cleanser into each room to signal a job well done.
Smell is very big business these days, not just the luscious designer scents of perfumes, but the modest fragrances of everyday domestic products like laundry powder and dish soap. Then, too, manufacturers add smells to edible products to enhance their flavour, like butterscotch-scented coffee beans, and other travesties of nature.
Until recently, nobody really knew how the sense of smell works. Indeed, smell was somewhat neglected by earlier scientists, who regarded this sense as more animal, lower and thus less worthy of investigation than sight or hearing. When one considers the bases of some ancient perfumes, this depreciation becomes more reasonable: castoreum from beaver glands, musk from deer guts, and, yes, I’m afraid, civet from cat butts.
Today, the dominant scientific theory posits that smell is determined by the shape of inhaled molecules. Chandler Burr’s wonderfully entertaining 2002 book, The Emperor of Scent, describes the efforts of a maverick scientist to develop and promote an alternative explanation of smell. The scientist, Luca Turin, was born with an insatiable interest in science and an exquisitely sensitive nose. Together these lead him to the view that smell depends not on shape but on atomic vibrations within aromatic molecules. As it turns out, alas, the Nobel Prize in science was just awarded to staunch partisans of the shape theory, Linda Buck and Richard Axel. But a quick Google search reveals that, though spurned by the scientific establishment, Luca Turin has applied his vibrational theory to inventing novel odorants for the international flavour and fragrance industry. Though there’s something puzzling about the idea of patenting smells, I guess property rights in synthetic scents mean a few beavers and cats can rest more easily.
This weekend, I was trolling Martins’ for vital Thanksgiving baking supplies, having just run out of cinnamon in the middle of doing something complicated with pumpkins. My eye was caught by what looked like a cheap CD player. I picked up the adjacent diskette. For a mere $5.49, “Febreze” promised me fifty-hours’ worth of a “scent story” entitled, “strolling through the garden.” Five scents on the diskette would be activated to evoke a series of experiences: “strolling by lilacs,” “picking peachy freesias,” “making a bouquet,” beside the honeysuckle” and among the roses.” Fifty hours struck me as a long time to spend loitering in the garden, but what a bargain. No thorns, no weeding, everything in bloom at once and no hayfever.
Perhaps Turin can develop a Thanksgiving “scent story”: a diskette that wafts the aromas of mashed potatoes, gravy and cranberries, followed by the sweat of a football game. And, for dieters, there could be a low-calorie 10-hour version.