What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [49]
In the recent evolutionary past we have evolved entire subfamiles of odor receptors not shared by the chimpanzee—our closest living relative. An intriguing possibility is that these new receptors are tuned to detect new smells—ones that only recently became important to human survival. It’s speculation on my part, but I’d bet these receptors pick up the nuances of grilled meat—salmon filets and mastodon steaks—along with the volatiles of fermentation: not only milk products, but alcoholic drinks from beer to wine. On a daily basis we season food to please our palate, but over the long run our palate is evolving to match our menu.
I also suspect that dogs are part of the whole story. Dogs were first domesticated by man somewhere in Siberia about 15,000 years ago, just as human populations were shifting from a hunter-gatherer existence to sedentary village life. Increasingly preoccupied with the complex man-made aromas of the cooking pot, our ancestors began to rely on hunting dogs to locate the telltale scent of game. Having co-opted the canine nose, our own scent-tracking ability began to fade. Dogs became, in effect, our long-distance noses, while we specialized in the close-in smelling of food in the mouth.
Dog and humans have complementary nose skills: dogs have little retronasal ability but great distance detection; humans vice versa. (I’m unable to find a single scientific paper on canine retronasal smell. According to pet-food manufacturers, dogs sniff first and gulp later; they don’t spend a whole lot of time savoring food in the mouth.) The Yale University neurobiologist Gordon Shepherd suggests that retronasal smelling “has delivered a richer repertoire of smells in humans than in nonhuman primates and other mammals.” I would go further and claim that humans are a retronasal species; our best olfactory skills are reserved for appreciating food aromas at the point of eating. Our talent is smelling food in the mouth, not food on the hoof. When it comes to tracking the scent of a gazelle on the savannah, we can’t compete with our hounds; but once we drag it back to the campfire we can sure season the hell out of it.
CULTURES ALL OVER the world may choose from the same selection of spices, but that doesn’t guarantee that we all find each other’s cuisines equally appealing. Aromas mark differences between cultures, along with all the moral baggage that entails. On a field trip to Costa Rica, when Miss Stevens admonishes him to “respect other cultures this instant!” Eric Cartman replies, “I wasn’t saying anything about their culture, I’m just saying their city smells like ass.” Offhand dismissals of cultural differences aren’t limited to the fourth graders of South Park. Before he became the president of France, Jacques Chirac was mayor of Paris, and made himself notorious for observing that “the noise and the odor” of freeloading immigrant families would reasonably push a hardworking Frenchman over the edge. He hastened to add, in Cartman fashion, “It is not racist to say this.”
Smell prejudice is not just a Eurocentric trait. Wang Lung, the fictional hero of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, moves to another region of China where his scent marks him as a outsider: “[W]hen an honest man came by smelling of yesterday’s garlic, they lifted their noses and cried out, ‘Now here is a reeking, pig-tailed northerner.’ The smell of the garlic would make the very shopkeepers in the cloth shops raise the price of blue cotton cloth as they might raise the price for a foreigner.”
Anthropologists tell us that olfactory stereotyping is central to tribal identity. The Desana people of Colombia’s Amazonian rain forest, for example, believe each tribe has a characteristic odor due partly to heredity and partly to what it eats: “Thus, the Desana, who are hunters, are said to exude the musky smell of the game which they eat. Their neighbours, the Tapuya, on the other hand, live by fishing and are thought to smell of fish. The nearby Tukano are agriculturalists