The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Is anyone else getting a whiff of rotten meat?
Simon Ings on the science behind our wildly personal reactions to smell – and how history has shaped them
Smell is a personal affair. Just how personal was brought home to me, with some force, when Isabel Bannerman – garden designer to the great, the good and the royal – had the temerity, the sheer gall, in her latest book, to call blackcurrants “fat with smell, dissonant and dirty”.
She probably meant it in a nice way. She has an evocative turn of phrase: Scent Magic –a gardening year seen (as it were) entirely through the nose – includes this description of the seed pods of wintersweet: if crushed, they “smell of dusty cloves, spiced wines and the depths of unused drawers”. Still, blackcurrants provided the olfactory track to my childhood and she had no business putting such terrible thoughts in my head. Dirty, indeed!
We have often ludicrously strong reactions to smell, and to the language of smell. This is because we have two completely separate neurological pathways to handle olfactory information. One triggers disgust; the other piques the appetite. Our initial responses to smell are lightning fast: long before we know what a smell is, we know whether it is “good” or “bad”. But smells are neither good nor bad in themselves, unless and until memory makes them so. So why is our olfactory landscape arranged the way it is?
This story begins, not in the flower-garden, but in the privy. In his book Smells – which charts the shifts in our sense of smell from the Renaissance to the Napoleonic Empire – French historian Robert Muchembled gets down to basics. It takes around five years for European children to construct disgust at their own excrement, he says. (Indeed, this is virtually the first thing he says: Smells is not for the faint-hearted.) “People nowadays are unwilling to acknowledge this,” he writes, “preferring to believe that such disgust is as natural as it is universal. In fact it is the result of several centuries of cultural pressure.”
The smell of ordure didn’t betoken anything particularly offensive until humans gathered in cities in sufficient numbers to poison their own water supply.
And the revulsion that finally accompanied the smell of human excrement didn’t automatically extend to that of other animals – witness Polycarpe Poncelet’s 1755 recipe for a cheap and excellent liqueur “that simply required distilling a ripe cowpat in brandy”.
Improvements in urban hygiene weren’t driven by expanding medical knowledge. Self-care fashions, following Europe’s devastating wars of religion – the gloves, ruffs, table-manners, handkerchiefs and all the rest – were driven primarily by a generalised anxiety around the proximity of death. This war-borne death terror manifested as a growing denial of our animal nature. Both Catholic and Calvinist communities began teaching that the Devil nestled in the lower body, “couched in excrement and urine”.
Crammed with their animals and stinking trades into cities without a proper (or in some cases, any) sewage system, people learnt quickly that water was dangerous, but it was a while before they learnt much about soap.
The population of medieval Europe, Muchembled writes, “should be imagined as filthy, crawling with vermin, and scabies-ridden”. With no germ theory of illness to hand, preventive medicine consisted of a series of disconnected nostrums, among them the idea of fighting fire with fire. Polish peasants confronting an outbreak of the plague used to throw stinking animal carcasses into the streets in “an effort to drive out the pestilential air”. Some of the flavours we savour today were first used prophylactically, precisely because they smelt so bad. A French peasant, having breathed in the air from the privy upon waking, might then go sniff a bit of rotten cheese. Both offered an unpleasant olfactory shield against disease. One German doctor was still recommending privy sniffing as late as 1680, but – happily for dairy farmers – it’s the taste for strong cheese that has persevered to the modern age.
Henri IV, who couldn’t stand the smell of garlic, smothered himself in the stuff. (Only Provence and Gascony relished garlic, back then; they were roundly mocked.) Ambergris, musk and civet were worn because they smelled of the glandy innards of dead animals.
Cities sorted themselves out, pushing their graveyards and slaughterhouses to the outskirts. Out of sight, out of mind: artists were hired to paint out figures carrying out bodily functions in works by Bruegel (X-ray studies reveal there were a lot of them). By the 1640s water and bodily hygiene were making a comeback.
After 1720, the plague dwindled. And as the fear of death ebbed, so too did the era’s rampant misogyny.
Men no longer wore powerful perfumes (civet, ambergris and the rest) to “conquer” women. And as sweet perfumes came into fashion, women smothered themselves with extracts of flowers and fruits.
In cleaning up our act, we have, in the past couple of centuries, created an impoverished olfactory environment for ourselves, a deodorised world that offers us a modest antidote to our existential terror of death. Just as we spurn wrinkly vegetables and throw away anything with a speck of mould on it, we avoid strong smells, even as we tell ourselves that our sense of smell is quite poor, compared to that of other mammals. (This isn’t true.) We have come to imagine that scentlessness equals cleanliness.
This isn’t true, either: in Scent Magic, Bannerman quotes a University of Virginia study from 2008 that concludes that air pollution is destroying plant fragrance. Scent molecules can travel up to a couple of kilometres in unpolluted air. In cities, a couple of hundred metres’ travel is enough to denature them.
The revolt against scentlessness has been gathering for a while. Muchembled mentions avant garde perfumes with names like Bat and Rhinoceros. A friend of mine favours Musc Kublaï Khän for its faecal notes. Another spends a small fortune to smell like cat’s pee. Right now I’m wearing Andy Tauer’s Orange Star – don’t approach unless you like Quality Street orange cremes macerated in petrol.
Our deodorised culture may disregard a few eccentric parfumiers. But how, I wonder, will it handle all the smells returning to our curiously quiet springtime streets? Living too long in London, and lacking the vocabulary, I have little enough to report, but as the air clears under the Covid-19 lockdown, even I am beginning to recognise the gardens I walk pass by scent as well as by appearance, and the sweetness spilling from the hawthorn trees around here carries more than a whiff of rotten meat. The cumulative effect of all these smells is more uncanny than merely pleasant.
But “smells have a life force that speaks to us in an old language,” Bannerman writes, “and what I am interested in was expressed by Antonin Artaud: ‘where there is the stink of s--there is a smell of being’.”
It takes five years for European children to learn to be disgusted at their excrement
Scent Magic by Isabel Bannerman (Pimpernel, £30) and Smells by Robert Muchembled (Polity, £17.99)