I Have Lost My Sense of Taste

Imagine being on a sabbatical cycling and eating your way across New Zealand. Then imagine falling off your bike and getting such a bad concussion that you lost your sense of taste which—weeks later—hasn't come back and may never will. For one food-loving writer, this is her scary (and annoying) reality.

I may never smell my baby's head. But more immediately pressing, I will never taste this bowl of pasta.

After hitting a New Zealand road head-first from a speeding bike, I developed what my ex-boyfriend is taking great pleasure in calling "brain damage." I prefer the term brain injury. Either way, I ended up on the wrong end of a seven-hour stretch in Dunedin hospital throwing up into a small cardboard tub before wandering back to my Harry Potter-themed hostel to vomit a little further into my bedroom sink. I had post-concussion syndrome and there was nothing—save lying under the Hogwarts coverlet and trying not to bleed—that I could do about it.

There are several common, unfortunate side-effects to giving your brain a metaphorical kick in the balls: tinnitus, memory loss, blurred vision, nausea, and headaches to name just the star players. But while some of these swam briefly in and out of my concussive consciousness, the only lasting legacy I'm really suffering is anosmia. That's right. I cannot smell, or subsequently taste my arse from my elbow.

According to The Anosmia Foundation, over two million Americans suffer from a loss of smell, often due to head injuries. Concussion and damage to the olfactory bulb—the area of the brain that feeds information from your nasal receptors up to your thalamus—have long been linked to a subsequent loss of smell, although in 22 percent of cases, anosmia is idiopathic. It has no determinable cause.

Often, when anosmia is caused by a head-on collision, it is because the person has damaged or bruised the soft tissue at the top of their nose. It can also, however, be that the slam to the back of the head (in my case) causes your brain to whack into the front of your skull—like passengers in a shunted car—and damage the nerves that lead from your nose into your brain. You have, in effect, broken the stink link.

The problem with losing your sense of smell is that you are consequently robbed of a sense of taste. While your tongue can recognize four (or five, if you count umami) basic flavors—salty, sour, sweet, and bitter—your nasal receptors can recognize and differentiate between over 900 different chemical compounds, or smells. When you eat an orange, your tongue registers a bit of sweet and a bit of sour. Your nasal receptors, on the other hand, will reel through a symphony of citrus-soaked evenings in Seville, childhood bottles of Capri Sun, piercing notes of neroli, the squirt of washing up liquid and the ping of freshly-pierced zest. Your tongue is the bongo to your nose's grand piano. Without the latter, all you're left with are the blunt thwacks of the former.

Since losing my sense of smell, I—a woman who once ate an entire saucepan of brown rice at a dinner party instead of pudding—have developed the sort of raging sweet tooth usually found in heroin addicts. I am eating chocolate, biscuits, ice cream, and cake like a woman ordered to contract diabetes. This, explains a Liverpool-based general practitioner friend of mine, Dr. Noam Dover, is because, "Your brain can still recognize sweet as sweet, so it gets overexcited. Without your sense of smell to disentangle them, your brain cannot process complicated tastes and smells like coffee or garlic, so you can't taste what they are."

Right now, coffee just tastes of burnt. Garlic tastes of sour. Almost anything that isn't a single-note smell tastes of carbon. And that's on a good day. On a bad day, a whole plate of cauliflower bhaji, dahl, garlic naan, pilau rice, and okra might as well be a collection of bath toys for all that I can taste them. Certain sensations may dance across my tongue —the burning of chilli, the dryness of salt—but that heady mist of flavor is gone. It's as absent as a vagina at a Strokes reunion.

Smell takes up much less space in the cerebral cortex—where the brain knits together and analyzes sensations—than sight. This is why you can differentiate the lines, colors, shapes, textures, movement, and quality of a single button, but even a fairly well-developed nose will only get the general impression of vinegar or woodsmoke. "The good news is that there are stem cells at the top of your nose that may regenerate into nerves," explains Dr Dover. "For years, scientists have been harvesting these stems cells out of people's noses and trying to put them in areas of diseased brains—with Parkinson's, for instance—in the hope that they will grow new nerves and cure those diseases."

So unlike someone buying a Top Gear box-set, I may one day have a sense of taste. In the meantime, I am left with the memory of flavor and the ability to cook by sight. Meals that I have made more times that you've had hot dates are safe because I can visually judge how much salt I need, how many tomatoes, the quantity of lemon juice, and the amount of parsley. But to cook something new—even by following a recipe—is like running through Paddington Station at night wearing a blindfold. I have no idea if I'm on the right track. I simply don't know if the finished dish has come out as it should.

I still have gnawing and persistent cravings for certain foods and spent a whole afternoon the other day trying to find a café that sold cheese scones. But when I finally eat them, I have to make do with mere texture, mouthfeel, and eventual fullness. Like having a tepid bath under a bare 40-watt bulb, it's not that it's unpleasant. I just know it could be so much better.

On the upside, this means that I could become the world's healthiest hungry woman. If I can just tame this ferocious desire for sweet things, I could easily survive on a diet of vegetables and brown rice. I could stop adding salt, omit butter, drink black tea, and snack on celery. Because, for the foreseeable future, it'll make absolutely no difference to the taste. I won't though. I know I won't. You can't just cure greed with a bang to the head.