The Doctor’s Surgery

As coronavirus sufferers are discovering, a sense of smell is essential to enjoying the great pleasures of eating

Of all sensory losses, that of smell is usually taken the least seriously.

Many people treat it almost as a joke, though it is essential to what we normally call the sense of taste. Without it, we can distinguish only sweet, sour, salt and bitter. Pleasure in eating then becomes minimal and food becomes mere fuel. In an age such as ours, in which culinary aesthetics are almost the only aesthetics that most people take seriously, or in which they show any judgement, loss of the sense of taste is of great importance.

The sense of smell declines with age and can disappear altogether in diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Closely observing a relative with the former disease, I noticed first that he would push away his food, with the remark that it tasted of nothing, though to me it seemed quite highly flavoured.

He attributed the tastelessness to the food, of course, rather than to himself, and it never occurred to him to wonder why everything put before him was so bland.

His appetite has since dwindled, though how far this has been caused by his sensory loss I cannot say for certain. Speaking for myself, if food lost its savour, I doubt I should be able to maintain much interest in it. The argument that one must eat to live would not impress me very deeply.

It sometimes takes more than an hour to cajole the old relative into eating something. When I watch his carers doing precisely this, I marvel at their patience. I would not be able to stand it myself – certainly not day after day.

One of the unexpected symptoms of infection with COVID-19 has been the sudden loss of the sense of smell, which (according to one survey) occurs in more than half of patients. Usually, the anosmia of COVID occurs in conjunction with more usual symptoms of infection, such as fever and persistent cough, but sometimes it is the only symptom.

In most cases, the loss of sense of smell recovers within a month, but one of my only acquaintances who has had the disease – a doctor as it happens – remains anosmic four months after he was first infected.

I think the loss of the sense of smell is harder to imagine than that of sight or hearing: which is not, of course, to say that it is more serious. Nevertheless, if I were condemned by COVID-19 or some other cause to sit through thousands of meals for the rest of my life and masticate something that had only consistency, sweetness, acidity, saltiness or bitterness, and to swallow it only because I knew I had to do so to keep alive, I think that I would feel it as a great loss.

It would not by itself make life not worth living, but it would certainly detract from my joie de vivre – and I count myself by no means a gourmet. In my day, I even liked NHS sandwiches, and went to meetings only for their sake, before financial stringency made them a thing of the past, like haruspicy and moxibustion. Once we had to bring, and pay for, our own sandwiches, my rate of attendance at meetings declined. I don’t think I was much missed.

Can anything be done for anosmia, at least of the Covid-induced type? It is sometimes claimed that re-educating the nasal receptors by means of smelling essential oils hastens recovery, but I doubt this claim rests on sound scientific evidence. Have double-blind – or, I should say, double-anosmic – trials been performed?

In the absence of proof, however, we must (to change metaphors) clutch at straws. When you come to think of it, that is what human life is: clutching at straws.