Smell, Fermentation, and America

By Anonymous -
I spend a fair amount of time on the New York Times website. Its just a fact at this point. Instead of Buzzfeed, which I have previously been addicted to, I spend large quantities of time reading obscure Op-Ed articles. Imagine my surprise when I found and article that actually quotes Constance Classen, the author of The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch, although this article focuses on smell.

Sensory perception is extremely dependent on culture. English speaking cultures are astonishingly poor at naming odors, a fact that has been agreed upon for the past thirty years. Smells like cinnamon, lemon, and rose are tough for Americans to name, while colors are extremely easy to distinguish between. However, when researchers visited foraging tribes on the Malay Peninsula, they collected different results. These individuals were nearly as good at identifying smells as they were at identifying sights.

This reminded me of JBK and Betsey Dyer's article that we read earlier in the semester. They discuss the phenomena of smell-blindness to the fermented foods of one's own culture, but the intense repulsion experienced towards foreign fermented foods. Dyer even suggests that part of this smell blindness is due to the fact "that humans have a rather poor sense of smell and this may go along with an exceptionally impoverished vocabulary for describing odors" (Bruberg-Kraus and Dyer). Based on this article, this statement really rings true with me. Especially in American culture, our world is extremely sight driven, to the point where all of our other senses are secondary.

This article is really worth a read, it also discusses how synesthetic metaphors affect sensory perception as well.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/opinion/sunday/how-culture-shapes-our-senses.html?_r=0

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