11 books like What the Nose Knows

Gordon Shepherd gave the developing science of neurogastronomy – which studies how the human brain perceives food from the information processed through smell, taste, sight, touch, and hearing – its name. A leading expert on olfaction, he is perfectly qualified to draw the link between aroma and flavor, and why Luca Turin would claim that smell provides 90 percent of what we taste. His description of the importance of retronasal smell, and the mechanics involved, turned a term that was fun to toss around tasting beer with friends into a revelation.

Luca Turin, a biophysicist and writer, is obsessed with smell. You know those poetic-seeming, almost made-up descriptors we see in wine marketing? Well, that’s how he talks about smells. Turin also wants to figure out how we smell, which we still don’t know the answer to. Ultimately, by delving into some past research and building on it, he finds some answers, though they’re still not widely embraced.

Burr shares Turin’s story about the complexities of navigating the world of sensory science, especially as a passionate iconoclast. It also left me thinking about the art and science of sensing and about who has more expertise–the seasoned perfumer who can detect the fine notes within a glass bottle or the research scientist trying to describe the smell in a purely factual, scientific way.

Harold McGee, known for his books on cooking, brings molecules to life in Nose Dive. The book truly is a field guide, with tables throughout listing the source of aroma compounds, the components smell, and the responsible molecules. For instance, looking at molecules explains why Europeans might think American garden strawberries smell more like pineapple than strawberry. Nose Dive is also inspiring. “When we nose an intriguing flower or finger a leaf or sip a cola, and take the time to sniff repeatedly and searchingly for component smells, we experience their qualities more fully than when we smell with brain on autopilot,” McGee writes.

In Neurogastronomy, Gordon Shepherd likens smells to human faces, writing that they are easy to recognize but hard to describe. In Flavor, Bob Holmes introduces readers to a small tribe of nomadic hunter-gatherers in Malaysia, the Jahai, who have more than a dozen words to describe smells, none of which relate to the smell of any particular object. Vocabulary, he writes, is something we can learn with little effort. His experiences with chefs, gastronomy experts, and food scientists may inspire readers to find personal vocabularies. In the end, he writes, “What’s important is that coming up with a description forces me to pay attention and paying attention enriches my flavor experience.”

Kiechle’s Smell Detective shows how smell, the mute sense, has been in fact quite “talkative.” By going back to the nineteenth-century United States, the book discusses how cities back then smelled and how people living there reacted to it. Olfaction is actually a critical source of knowledge. Smell can tell you a lot about your surrounding environment and other people. It also gives historians clues to understand how people lived in the past. Moreover, smell, like other senses, is not a simply subjective, biological phenomenon. Sensations we experience change over time—imagine smell and sounds on the street today and hundred years ago. It is also cultural and political, too. How people understand certain sensations is a historical product—a certain “bad” small was racialized and associated with a lower class, for example. This book is an excellent way to “sniff” out the history of the senses.

It seems as though Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees kicked off a slew of new books on seeing nature from a fresh perspective. Learning that trees communicate, as do other plants, warning and protecting each other is a sort of modern, scientific parlance for what in Shakespeare’s day might have been the fairyland antics in the anima of plants. But Thirteen Ways takes it a step further, opening an unexpected sensorial ‘conversation’ with our arboreal kin. Naso may be “smelling out the odouriferous flowers” in Love’s Labours Lost but Haskell has us inhaling deeply these silent sentinels that populate our lives with scant acknowledgment, with “every aroma is an invitation to stories of interconnection between trees and people.” And he proceeds to tell us some stories that make you ache for the intimacy of knowing a tree so well. I can’t wait to be able to identify a… show more.

At the center of this rollicking account is the larger-than-life figure of Luca Turin, a perfume aficionado and renegade biophysicist with an uncannily sensitive nose.

Burr followed him as he traded blows with the scientific establishment over his unorthodox theory of how smell works. What emerges is a profound appreciation of just how little understood this sense still is, and how varied and potent the smells of the world are to someone as attentive to them as Turin.

Behind weeds, trees are perhaps the most common plant many kids will encounter in their day to day lives, and another way children can access nature near home and school. And while trees are complex living things at the apex of the plant kingdom, they often are unnoticed and underappreciated. This beautiful lyrical picture book gives children a context to explore what a tree can do through kid-sized comparisons to what children can also do. Use it to help children explore one of the most common features of both urban and rural landscapes: trees.

A street at the edge of the Pacific in Monterey where sardines are brought in to be canned, is the setting for a collection of colorful characters Steinbeck knew.

Chief among them is Doc, based on Steinbeck’s friend Ed Ricketts, who operated a lab that collected and prepared aquatic specimens for schools and museums. The lab is still there, next to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

The canneries closed by the 1970’s and today Cannery Row is a thumping tourist trap. But I loved the book because of Doc, a gentleman, and a scholar if there ever was one.

A gruesome story of murder and desire that also happens to have the most vivid olfactory descriptions of any genre.

Suskind’s preternatural ability to summon odor from the page makes you feel as if you are there beside him, walking through the flowered hillsides of Provence, or in the back room of a perfume shop on the Pont au Change. His twisted use of classic perfume techniques is as accurate as it is chilling.