The Menu You Can Smell

Not many people realise the power and wonder of our sense of smell.

It’s the one sense that has a direct route to our limbic system, the regions related to emotion and memory, whilst others take a more circuitous route, through layers of processing.

What this means is that, for people who suffer degenerative diseases and problems with cognitive function, their other senses start to get disrupted and distorted as they travel through the brain.

But uniquely for smells their power remains. So even if we can no longer see the words “shepherds pie” and process what that combination of letters means, if we smell Shepherds Pie we will immediately recognise and understand what that scent is.

************************

When Aisha’s daughter Millie started struggling to maintain a regular appetite, she knew already what the effects of malnourishment looked like. As a student nurse she encountered scores of unwell patients who were said to have “lost interest” in food.

But Aisha’s mindset doesn’t wait for a solution to come from others. So she started getting creative with how she engaged her daughter with food. One day she gathered together all of the fruit she had in the fridge and started chopping it up with Millie and encouraging her to look at it, to touch it, to smell it.

And when Millie smelled the freshly cut strawberries she started gesturing, asking to taste it.

Aisha began to realise that not only was the desire for food still there, if a little dormant, but the smell of the fruit itself was generating the release of hormones that was actively preparing her daughter’s body to eat.


But to take this idea to the mainstream and scale it up across the country would require Aisha to replicate the appetising smell of foods, but in an efficient and reuseable form. And that would require a professional perfumer…