Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell

"As a journalist I enjoy reading books that get me as close as possible to first-hand sources of information. I’ll definitely admit to a bias on this list towards researchers and academics, and I think part of that is because these writers have very intimate relationships with primary sources, and are generous in sharing them. These books are also great starting points for inspiration that’ll send you down even deeper rabbit holes. Like Corbin’s book, Aroma is one of the rare histories that emphasize smell, but it is far more expansive in scope than Corbin’s volume. The authors’ contention is essentially that smell has been silenced in modernity, and the book is an attempt to break this olfactory silence, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphors. “History has underappreciated the very physical, carnal, bodily experience” It’s a crash course in the changing notions around smell over time, and at the same time, it’s this really delightful journey through these lost odours. They write about the scent of the most famous perfume of Ancient Egypt , and my god what I wouldn’t give for a whiff of that! I’m so curious. Again, we can see the pyramids, but we have so little information about what life smelt like and what life tasted like. Maybe it’s because we have traditionally elevated and valued other senses above the more physical senses of taste and smell. History has underappreciated the very physical, carnal, bodily experience. I love these books, and this one, in particular, for remedying that. Because they’ve had a far more powerful effect on why we do things the way we do than we realise. In The Foul and the Fragrant, for example, we see the way that urban planning and the shape of cities were decided in no small part because of stench. You see it in New York as well: The banishment of factories out to deep parts of Brooklyn, and displacement of slaughterhouses to the edges of Manhattan was determined by odours. Because we live in these more deodorised environments, we don’t realise that the way things are today – literally including the shape of the streets – relates, in no small part, to smell. In another example, we tend to view smelling as rude. It’s rude to remark on what you notice about your friend’s body aroma. It’s rude to sniff yourself, or your food, or anything, because it implies there’s something wrong. Because I now embrace this very olfactory-focused mindset, when I go out to eat sushi, I sniff every piece. I’m always wondering if the chef takes it as an insult. Does he think that I’m checking the fish to see if it’s fresh? Because really, I’m just trying to deepen the pleasure of that bite. “Urban planning and the shape of cities were decided in no small part because of stench” This perception that smelling things and each other is impolite was a very deliberate shift brought about because of class upheavals, politics, and religion. It wasn’t an accident. That book Aroma argues that smell became threatening at some point. I should add there was also this elevation of sight over smell. If you think about it, when we see one other, we engage with each other’s exteriors, but smell reflects the interior self. It’s something that we guard a little more closely, that we haven’t decided to share with the world. So, the authors make this argument that smell became threatening because it was seen as more personal and more revealing, in a way that was not deliberate. To summarise, I think that taste and smell are so inextricably bound up with cultural practices, and even physical landscapes, that to ignore them means robbing ourselves of a much deeper understanding of how and why we live the way that we do."