Can you tell by the smell?

                                   Can you tell by the smell?

My weekly  shopping  is characterized by a kind of a “ritual” to which I most happily engage when having to select  particular fruit-and a couple of vegetables- during summer time. Melons, water-melons, tomatoes and cucumbers  give a very distinct and most fine smell. Such a smell works as a sign for quality and guarantees full taste.

I had just engaged in this ritual this past Saturday morning-and obviously turned a public space into a sensory landscape, much like all customers do in a supermarket- when a lady who happened to be standing right next to me  noticed my practice and asked: “can you tell by the smell?”. I was surprised and felt as if I had been suddenly awaken by her. My “journey” to the senses was interrupted. I turned to her and replied positively: “yes, I can. See, melons, water melons and cucumbers have a fine smell. And you can tell by the smell. If there is no smell or the smell is annoying, then they are bad.” “How interesting, very interesting” she stressed in a bright face. I left her wondering and continued my shopping.

I can recall having seen, touched, smelled and eaten fresh fruit and vegetables just picked from the field when living at home. Over the years, I developed an attachment to what anthropologists call the sensory landscape. I taught myself to distinguish sweet taste from bitterness just by smelling cucumbers and while cutting them. I also learnt to distinguish sweet from non sweet melons again by smelling them. Different smells could reveal different things to me. I was led to this conclusion after tasting bitter cucumbers and tasteless melons and water melons. My first experiments to “tell by the smell” were successful, so I decided to cling on the sense of smell so as to foresee the quality of taste of raw food.

This use of senses, during which one is used for the sake of the other, is called synaesthesia. D. Sutton[1] describes the term as encompassing different relations between senses. He quotes Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1999): “From color, steam rising, gloss and texture, we infer taste smell and feel. . . .Taste is something we anticipate and infer from how things look, feel to the hand, smell (outside the mouth), and sound”.

D. Sutton, in concluding his review on works on food and the senses, advises us to turn to “everyday life and the multiple contexts in which the culturally shaped sensory properties and sensory experiences of food are invested with meaning, emotion, memory, and value”. (p 220) His article on the food and the senses emphasizes the role of the taste and refers to relations between taste and other senses.

I would here like to agree with and emphasize the fact that sensory experiences are invested with meanings and values and want to touch briefly on this by unfolding my personal relation to smell and its meanings as seen through synaesthesia. It is my conviction that people can learn to tell by the smell-even though I am fully aware of the slippery ground on which I touch, given the modern techniques of food production and consumption in urban areas in particular. Still, experimenting with the sense of smell while in Los Angeles, I found that it is safe enough a guide on which to rely.

Such an emphasis on smell does not allude to an exclusive role of memory or to a passive attachment to personal experiences (from early childhood up to a few months ago) when accessing local farms full of seasonal plants and tress and occasionally helping with the daily harvest. I do not reproduce this kind of past, nor I do not imagine it. I only use the particular sense as a form of “knowledge” in order to imagine- and somehow predict- another sense. I am drawing a causal relation between the two senses and incorporate a feeling of time: if smell is good right now, then taste will be good as soon as I consume the product. I recycle the outcome of my previous direct engagement with fruit and vegetables, I advance my own preference for smell instead of sound and I continuously test the value of smell.  

I impose an aspect of my subjectivity to the process of fruit selection thus investing smell with a specific meaning. To the extent that I prove right, the sense of smell confirms itself as an infallible guide, it invites for more trust and hence for future use and it strengthens its relation to taste. This is the meaning that I attribute to smell within the framework of synaesthesia.

  This preference can be further illustrated by the fact that I have noticed how other people seem to tell by the sound. I have seen them knocking on melons and water melons while bending over the fruit to listen to the produced sound. When first noticing this practice, it appeared very strange to me and completely unsafe to trust, so I asked my friend who engaged in this very process too. She replied that: “you can tell by the sound that the fruit is good enough and ripe or not”.

It is my belief and constant practice that we need to let “culturally shaped sensory properties” aside for a moment (if we think of them as influencing and directing individuals to specific cultural practices) and turn to subjective experiences and uses of them so as to explore  a broad nexus of relations between senses that people can draw or manipulate. By this I mean the limits, errors or new alternatives and possibilities to which they are open and thus understand how people invest them with meaning.

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[1] D. Sutton (2010): “Food and the senses”. In: Annual Review of  Anthropology,  39:209–23.