HNFSC: aroma

how aroma enhances your favorite dish and Nike’s brand

Welcome back to my series on the Hierarchy of Needs for Food System Change! If you missed the intro to what this is all about and why I’m writing about it, check out this page.

I’m exploring the world of smells, sniffs and whiffs by delving into the world of aroma. There was a part of me that always wanted to get into perfumery and aroma work while I was at school, to the point that I had bought a book on the science of perfume. I’d bike down to Skuespilhuset and overlook the Copenhagen Opera House and read it while drinking a coffee. I was living the poor grad student life and this was a great third space for me on a Friday night to think about how food and aroma blended.

what is aroma?

Aroma is a smattering of molecules that make up the nasal fingerprint of a food. Remember from our recent post on taste that flavor is a composite of both the taste and aroma of food or drinks. There are many articles claiming that aroma has an outsized role on flavor, though gastrophysician Charles Spence winces at folks claiming it’s 75% of flavor.

Every one of these aromas has a different detection threshold. That is, the lowest concentration at which you would be able to begin smelling a particular aroma. There are many sulfur compounds that can be noticed at the parts per trillion level like grapefruit mercaptan. Many of the most disgusting smells, like trimethylamine (turned seafood) or hydrogen sulfide (the smell of eggs), have very low thresholds. Academic folks have theorized that this is evolutionarily important for humans to avoid foods that have spoiled and would make you sick. Did we evolve this species-level aversion after our ancestors got sick constantly or did we have these innate disgusts?

There are many factors that make up the threshold of the aroma in food: the shape, size and polarity of the aroma compound, its concentration in the food, the acidity of the dish, and its solubility in water and oil. The only one that we as home cooks and eaters can look at influencing is the acidity of food. Think of how deglazing a dish with red wine can make thea dish more robust. You’re clearly throwing in new tastes and aromas with the wine, but you’re also dropping the pH (or raising the acidity, depending on how you like to think about this) and this can push aroma molecules out of solution to be more readily sniffed.

how do we smell aromas?

Much like taste, we break down the structure of a food and this releases the aroma molecules. Unlike taste though, we can notice them before we even put the food in our mouth. This is retro and orthonasal olfaction, respectively. We’ll dig into these in a second, but regardless of the path traveled, aroma molecules sweep across the olfactory bulb and start the neuronal network to your brain, letting you know what you’re smelling. Molecules can be perceived as having similar aromas, so the taste, the sight and other factors give us a better idea of what we’re eating. After all, you do eat with your eyes first.

Let’s start with orthonasal olfaction though. Aroma compounds from your pizza are swirling into the environment and, like James Nestor hopes, we breathe in through our nose. These molecules are normalized to your body temperature when they first enter and then hit this olfactory bulb before going to the lungs. This bulb is a series of different lock-and-key-like receptors that the compounds will bind to and tell your brain that you’re smelling that grandma slice from Prince Street.

Now, for retronasal olfaction, you pick these up after you’ve begunbegan to eat that slice, chew it and swallow it. Breaking down the cup-and-char peps starts to release new compounds or new concentrations of the same compounds, possibly changing the experience. Since you also have this new taste dimension, it’s tough to know where aroma starts and taste begins. Despite this, you should try to get yourself to breathebreath back out through your nose while eating because, first and foremost, you’ll look like a crazy person mouth-breathing a pie on the sidewalk, but also you’re losing the next dimension of flavor if you don’t. No one wants to walk out of the pearly gates of FlavorTown early.

aroma’s effect on time and space

You’ve likely heard how smell has the strongest link to memory and much of that is due to how we develop as humans. Our scent machinery is the only one fully developed when we’re born and remains being the most developed sense until just around puberty, when vision surpasses it. All of our preferences and memories are tied to this sense during childhood, so the flashback to grandma’s house after smelling a particular brand of chicken soup is relived through this set of flavor molecules. When I think about early memories with my grandma, for example, I actually think of the smell of her home, and I seem to almost AI-generate a verisimilitudinous scene in my mind that likely never happened – that’s the power of scent memory, even over visual memory, in some cases.

Knowing how our smelling physiology works, it’s no wonder companies spend beaucoup bucks designing aromatic brand points. No matter where in the world you are, Subway always has a specific smell. Granted, this is also because they’re a huge franchise that ensures everything is the same. This combo of aroma and memory influences many aspects of. I was surprised to read that Nike works with aroma designers to make their signature scent in stores as the smell of a rubber basketball sneaker as it scrapes across the court and a soccer cleat in grass and dirt. The scent of an environment can improve the perception of how nice a product is and drive productivity. Think of the archetypical employee reheating tuna casserole for lunch that pisses off the rest of the office or how lighting a candle might allow you to decompress at night with some tea. Even on an individual level, there is this idea of creating a personal scent so that you associate someone with a perfume or cologne. Companies like dossier and noteworthy help people lean into this idea.

None of this is supposed to be conspiratorial or down with Big Smell. I find it incredibly fascinating that we have this whole olfactory world around us and most of the time we’re anosmic to it because it is so banal. Despite this, it shapes your mood and perception of the world around you, whether you’re going to eat it, or walk through The Pollution Pod exhibit (love Sissel Tolaas).

why does aroma matter?

Aroma is omnipresent. It shapes our world and thus shapes how we enjoy the food we eat. As we change to a new type of food system, we need to think through how this base element is going to bolster its evolution. Simple things like how steaming more sustainable foodstuffs impact our enjoyment rather than roasting them. Or more complex ideas like how to cook foraged items and understanding how they might stand in for ingredients we could normally get at the supermarket. Scent is endlessly fascinating and we’ll certainly come back to this item in the future.