What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [99]
IT IS THE natural order of things for smell preferences to change from generation to generation. Back in 1931, a survey ranked the popularity of fifty-five commonplace odors. The results were not surprising: pine, lilac, rose, and violet were at the top, garlic and perspiration at the bottom. It is odd to look back at some of the other smells included in the survey: witch hazel, sarsaparilla, lard, and turpentine. These were commonplace seventy-seven years ago, but today they seem exotic. When did the last drop of sarsaparilla evaporate from the national smellscape? Did it outlive witch hazel? It would be enlightening to track changes in odor perception and public opinion over the long term. What we need is a Scent Census.
The architect Rem Koolhaas knows how rapidly a smellscape can vanish. “I turned eight in the harbour of Singapore. We did not go ashore, but I remember the smell—sweetness and rot, both overwhelming. Last year I went again. The smell was gone. In fact, Singapore was gone, scrapped, rebuilt. There was a completely new town there.”
In the Northeastern United States the smell of burning leaves was once emblematic of autumn. Everyone understood Booth Tarkington’s allusion to it in The Magnificent Ambersons: “When Lucy came home the autumn was far enough advanced to smell of burning leaves, and for the annual editorials, in the papers, on the purple haze, the golden branches, the ruddy fruit, and the pleasure of long tramps in the brown forest.” The lazy plume of gray smoke from a smoldering leaf pile accompanied the mood of a declining season, a time of endings, sadness, and reflection. Edgar Lee Masters used it to depict an old man’s melancholy: “Now, the smell of the autumn smoke, / And the dropping acorns, / And the echoes about the vales / Bring dreams of life.”
By now, several generations of children have grown up without burning leaves. The scientist and physician Lewis Thomas thinks this is a shame: “[W]e should be hanging on to some of the great smells left to us, and I would vote for the preservation of leaf bonfires, by law if necessary.” For Thomas, playing by a curbside bonfire was fun and risky—the perfect childhood activity. “It was a mistake to change this, smoke or no smoke, carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect or whatever; it was a loss to give up the burning of autumn leaves.” Environmentalist sensibilities be damned; Thomas wanted to empty the leaf bags and toss a lit match. His nostalgic fantasy is unlikely to come true; few will ever know the acrid smoke and quiet crackle of burning leaves. The old incense of suburban lawn worship has been replaced by the new roar of leaf blowers and the fumes of half-burned gasoline.
A Blast from the Past
The need to preserve today’s smells might not seem urgent—after all, we can always use technology to recover the past. The trouble is that it takes an extraordinary effort to re-create an extinct smell. Take, for example, a 1984 study in which researchers tried to revive food aromas in order to study the composition of prehistoric diets. The smells they were after were locked into a fossilized human turd (politely known as a coprolite). The specimen in question was deposited on a cave floor in Utah about 6,400 years ago. Perfectly preserved by the desert climate, it presented the scientists with a challenge: there was no established protocol for resuscitating ancient poop. Accordingly, the research team spent a month inventing and perfecting their own technique. The first task was to produce a set of reference stool samples for training purposes. They did this by feeding a series of controlled meals (high fiber, mixed fruit and vegetable, peach only, etc.) to a selfless volunteer who saved the resulting output. His contributions were freeze-dried to create pseudo-fossils for pilot testing. To make the practice samples sniffable, they were soaked in a solution of trisodium phosphate until they released enough aroma for analysis. (Note to students planning science