The Daily - A Food Critic Loses Her Sense of Smell

Episode Date: March 23, 2021

For Tejal Rao, a restaurant critic for The Times, a sense of smell is crucial to what she does. After she contracted the coronavirus, it disappeared. It felt almost instant.“If you’re not used to it, you don’t know what’s going on,” she said. “It’s almost like wearing a blindfold.”We follow Tejal on her journey with home remedies and therapies to reclaim her sense. Guest: Tejal Rao, a California restaurant critic and columnist for The New York Times.Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Regaining a sense of smell is tedious and slow, but Tejal is using the only therapy proven to work.Listen to our Sunday Read about how the coronavirus could precipitate a global understanding of the sense of smell, which has long been disregarded as the least important sense.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is The Daily. Yesterday, we told the story of a rare but severe symptom of long COVID. A far more common symptom is the long-term loss of smell. Today, my colleague, Times restaurant critic, Tasia Rao, recounts the quest to try to get hers back. It's Tuesday, March 23rd. I was in the bathroom at my home in Los Angeles, and I was stepping into the shower, and I smelled something really unfamiliar. I thought maybe it was stagnant water or the plastic of the shower cap that I was wearing to cover my hair. I thought maybe it was the stone tiles, like had someone else just cleaned the bathroom? I couldn't figure it out. And then after a few minutes, I realized it was actually

a blank. There was no smell. I had just lost my sense of smell, just like that. And I still went ahead and took a shower. But the whole time I was sort of thinking, how soon can I get a test for, you know, how soon can I get tested for COVID? I had very mild symptoms. It was just like a rough flu or cold. I was exhausted. And my parents kept checking in, kept calling to remind me to eat. But I've never experienced a loss of appetite like that before. Any kind of meat made me feel a little bit queasy. So like roast chicken, which is a real comfort food for me normally, was just very, very squishy.

And popcorn was like foam, but with sharp bits in it, like so unpleasant all of a sudden. Everything about it that's a joy was very unpleasant. I started to feel better in early to mid-January. I didn't have to pass out and sleep for half the day. I could get back to work, but I still couldn't really smell anything. Smell is just, it's so crucial to taste, which means it's really crucial to everything that I do. I work as a restaurant critic, but I also develop recipes. I do, I work as a restaurant critic, but I also develop recipes. And it's really difficult to cook without a sense of smell.

If you're not used to it, you don't know what's going on. It's almost like wearing a blindfold. If you lost your taste buds, I'm going to show you how to get it back real quick. I started looking up what people were doing to get back their sense of smell or, you know, different kinds of aromatherapies. And I came across this TikTok video that had gone viral for a home remedy. You want to take a nice fresh orange and burn it all the way around. Make sure it's dark charcoal, black, black. This guy, Kamar Lalor, uploaded it. Burn an orange, a whole orange with the peel still on.

You burn it, you take the peel off, and then you mash the hot pulp of the orange with a little sugar and you eat it with a spoon. I'm no scientist, but it does work. I'm telling you, this is some Jamaican remedies. It's going to work, I promise you. So I thought I would give it a try. Okay, so I've got these tiny oranges.

They're so tiny, they're falling through the crate. Charring an orange, according to Kimara's TikTok video, was sort of the big event at my house that day. It was my partner, myself, our two dogs. We were all in the kitchen. This is a great way to spend a potato set. I have no idea. It's Tuesday. That's a great way to spend a, um, what day is it? I have no idea. It's Tuesday.

It's Wednesday. I think the dogs were probably wondering what we were doing. They were getting very annoyed. But we stood over the gas stove and charred some oranges. The peel's coming off really easily. And tried to follow his instructions as closely as we could. I knew that it was a TikTok video. You know, it wasn't a scientific paper that I had read.

But I was secretly really hopeful that it would work. I can't smell it. And it was still, things were still really muted, still really flat. So I called up Kumar, that's the guy who made the TikTok, to see if maybe I was doing it wrong. He was inside his car, parked outside his family restaurant where he works. We're located in Ontario, Toronto. They sell like goat curry and oxtail and roti. Jerk chicken, oxtail, curry goat, some nice rice, all that good stuff.

Curry goat. Oh, that sounds so good. And he was so optimistic. And, you know, I told him that it didn't exactly work for me. At least it didn't work the way it was advertised. Like it would cure me in an hour. I said, give it another try. Roast it again. Roast it for 12 minutes though. He said that I should try it every day. Okay. For 12 minutes and make sure to eat it hot. Okay. Got it. And then he asked if I wanted to speak to his mom

who taught it to him. And I thought, yes, I'd love to speak to your mom. And he just, he's like, mom. yes, I'd love to speak to your mom. And he's like, mom. Hello. Hi, Julian. And she came out and was equally like positive and joyful. God bless. Thank you very much. And so thrilled that her family remedy had kind of traveled all around the world and people were trying it, even if it hadn't worked for everyone. Okay. Back home in Jamaica, my mom would give us to her children then because she had 15 kids.

And when we are sick and we don't have any taste and any kind of stuff there, she just roasts the orange and puts the sugar on it and gives us to eat. And so we get back our taste and stuff and then we start to eat. Because that's what it's supposed to do, get back your sense. It's like it's sending something to your brain to reboost it. So the orange remedy didn't work as advertised for me. But the thing that Trudy Ann said, that the brain needs some kind of reboost, that got me wondering, what is the connection between the brain and the nose? what is the connection between the brain and the nose.

Hello? Hi, Pam, it's Tejal from the New York Times. Oh, hi. I did a little bit of research, and I found a place called the Monell Chemical Census Center in Philadelphia. They do lots of different kinds of research on smell and on taste, and I connected with a research scientist there, Dr. Pamela Dalton. Well, I'm a basic research scientist who studies how people use their sense of smell. And she studies, among many, many other things,

the ways that emotions can kind of change the way we smell things. Generally, when you lose your sense of smell under most circumstances, it's because the molecules actually can't get into the olfactory receptor area of the nose because of congestion. COVID is different in that way because most people who lost their sense of smell did so without having any nasal congestion whatsoever. Pam explained that during the pandemic, you know, millions and millions of people lost their sense of smell just in an instant. It was just like a light bulb got turned off or a switch got, you know, flicked off. And one moment they could smell and the next moment nothing smelled. And even though that's how we lose our sense of smell, that's not how we get it back. You know, there's not a switch that just kind of turns it back on.

We don't really understand how this system uses coding to develop all of the different smells that our brain is able to understand. So much of what we think of as taste is actually kind of happening in your nose and brain. taste is actually kind of happening in your nose and brain. It's your smell receptors, your 400 smell receptors, and they're all working to identify millions and millions, the estimate is a trillion smells. That then is sort of a readout for the brain to say, oh, those five types of cells that are activated mean I'm smelling a flower versus, you know, a pizza or coffee in the morning. But another thing she told me that made me feel a little optimistic is that olfactory receptor neurons are constantly regenerating every few weeks. Now, you as an adult have memories of what things should smell like. And that's why we think the olfactory retraining

may actually help because you're connecting the central input, your representation of what your coffee should smell like with the incoming molecular signals. Smells are connected to memories and moods and feelings. One way of thinking about it is that there's this map in your brain that you can follow to get smells back. But if your sense of smell's been gone for a long time, if you lose that map, it's more like starting from scratch. It's almost like if there's some map intact,

they can follow the right map to make the right connections. But if it's completely gone, they're just rew map to make the right connections. But if it's completely gone, they're just rewiring haphazardly. So I was really hopeful after talking with Pam that, you know, maybe there would be some way to find my way back to smelling by doing this thing called olfactory training or smell training. I just needed to learn how to actually do it. We'll be right back. I think most people don't understand what smell training is. And I could sum that up by saying, it's not what your nose does,

but rather what your brain does with the stimulation. I called Chrissy Kelly, who founded Abscent in the UK, and that's abscent as in smell. I remember when I got 100 people in my Facebook group, which was called Smell Training, thinking, oh my God, you know, wow, that's amazing. And she started this online community. And now we have 22.9 thousand. So there are a lot of us now. And she lost her sense of smell back in 2012 after some kind of viral infection.

And at that time, doctors didn't really recommend anything, but she read some research about smell training and how repetitive, structured sessions, smelling just four scents could potentially help people start to orient themselves again, pick up smells again. I quickly got to the point where being a student of my affliction was better than being a victim of my affliction. And it became an absolute passion. I wanted to formally learn what a smell training session should look like. And it's so much more like therapy than I expected it to be. There is so much anxiety about getting it right in the beginning that I just think it's really valuable to say, okay, this is the program, start with this. So kind of like therapy,

smell training works best if you're in a quiet space where you feel safe, where you can focus and think. I sat down at my little desk in my office at home with a box of spices. Okay, and now for the first jar, I just want you to sit there with it with no expectations. So she asked me to get four spices and not open them all immediately, open them one at a time. Okay. So hold it up to your nose. And I had cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, cumin. And I want you to just shut yourself down completely. I think what she was saying is, you know, turn off the thoughts that are analyzing what's happening right now and just kind of be in the moment. And just take little, I call them bunny sniffs, tiny little sniffs. When I was smelling

without her, when I was smelling on my own, I was taking these deep breaths and kind of trying to pull the aromas into my body. And that's actually, that doesn't work that well. So Chrissy suggested bunny sniffs, which is taking these teeny tiny little sniffs of air, you know, consecutive little sniffs. Then you pause and then take a breath because we don't want you to faint and then go back to it again. And I was immediately ready to say, I can't smell them very well. It's kind of like the cloves were in the next room and I could hear them a little bit. Like I could pick up a word every now and then, but I didn't know exactly what they were talking about. Okay, so don't judge yet.

And before I could complain, Chrissy asked me to kind of slow down, take my time. Don't say, oh, that was good or that wasn't good or I didn't get anything. Just sit with it. Okay. The second one. The second scent that we smelled together was a jar of whole cardamom pods. Cardamom is a really familiar smell to me. It's part of the reason I picked it to be part of my smell kit. My mom uses it mostly paired with meat, like in lamb biryani, there's often cardamom or in masala chai in tea with boiled with spices and ginger. It's just a really familiar, delicate floral scent. Okay. So Chrissy had me open the lid of the cardamom jar and she told me to close my eyes. I want you to imagine that you were looking into a really deep well. So deep that you don't know when, you know, the coin you toss in is going to hit the bottom. And to just keep listening. So imagine that you are waiting and

waiting and waiting. And people who have lost their sense of smell, I think that we smell more slowly. Chrissy used the term listening a lot when we were talking about smelling. It's like you're leaning in and you're trying to pick up as much as you can. So smell is instantaneous for healthy people. And I think it takes a longer time for us to receive, for the receptors to work and to feed that into the brain. You know, you throw the coin in and you wait and to kind of apply that to sniffing the cardamom pods. And just keep listening. So let's give that one a go. I'd forgotten that my grandfather, my mom's father, used to chew cardamom pods until I was doing this exercise. I think maybe to freshen his breath.

I don't know why he did that, but he was like my favorite grandparent. We were very close and he always smelled like cardamom. He died a few years ago. And when I was in the middle of this exercise, I remembered it, you know, and it opened up all these other memories that were connected to that. All the tasks that we're doing right now, the concentrating, the thinking, the waiting, the anticipation, all of those things are cognitive processes that happen higher up in the olfactory brain. I think of it more like a car that's passing me on the street with the windows open,

blasting a song, and you just hear a tiny snippet of the song, and it takes you a while to recognize it. You know, like you know the song came out that one summer that you wore those denim cut-off shorts and you were hanging out with your best friend and you definitely sang it at karaoke. And, you know, it's so familiar. It's right on the tip of your tongue, but you just can't get it. And then maybe 10 minutes later, you remember the name of the song.

When Chrissy and I kind of got to the end of our smell training session, she told me it's really about building confidence more than anything else. It's about building up your confidence. And before I spoke to Chrissy, I'd imagined smell training as being closer to like going to the gym or, you know, really cool, really active, really fun. I'd sort of imagined, so embarrassing, I'd sort of imagined like the Rocky theme song playing and I'm in like a cool track suit and I'm like jogging through Los Angeles. And it's so boring and lonely to just sit and smell and think. It can be kind of disheartening if you have a good day and then you have a bad day. It feels like you're going backwards. I don't think that the word

recovery is a good one to use because smell loss is an injury. So you recover from an illness, but an injury might leave you with some lasting scarring. You know, so if you were in a car accident and you were really badly banged up and had to have surgery or had scars somewhere, you wouldn't say, when am I going to recover from this? You would say, when are my scars going to heal? You don't just go from hurt to healed overnight. And that's what smell is like. You know, you don't just go back to normal. It's more like adjusting and learning how to live in a new space. It's really just the beginning. The smell training doesn't have a distinct timeline i have been very tempted to stop because it's really really tedious but over the weekend i got a ladder out of the garage and propped it up against the lemon tree in my front yard and they have this amazing like floral fruity perfume and I noticed that the the leaves too you

know I could smell the leaves and there's something about it that feels new too it feels so vivid and I feel so grateful for it in a way I think I'm just paying much closer attention to it than I used to. After two months, Tejal reports that her sense of smell has finally returned. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. We had a very tragic incident today here at the King Soopers. There was loss of life. We have multiple people who were killed in this incident.

On Monday afternoon, a gunman opened fire at a grocery store in a residential neighborhood of Boulder, Colorado, killing 10 people, including a police officer. The suspected shooter is in custody, but the police have not described a motive. It was the second mass shooting in less than a week, following the murder of eight people at spas in and around Atlanta, Georgia. And the Times reports that on top of his nearly $2 trillion stimulus package,

President Biden is preparing to recommend spending as much as $3 trillion on a sweeping set of new programs, beginning with a giant infrastructure plan. That plan calls for investing in roads, bridges, and rail lines, broadband internet for rural communities, charging stations for electric cars, charging stations for electric cars, and the construction of one million affordable housing units. To pay for it, Biden is expected to propose raising taxes on corporations, a tactic that is already meeting resistance from congressional Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell. I think the Trojan horse will be called infrastructure, but inside the Trojan horse will be all the tax increases. Biden may seek to pass his infrastructure plan through a legislative process known as reconciliation

that bypasses the need for Republican support in the Senate and requires just 51 votes rather than the usual 60. So, yeah, I fully expect that's what they'll try to do. And that's because I don't think there's going to be any enthusiasm on our side for a tax increase. Today's episode was produced by Tina Antolini, edited by Wendy Dorr, engineered by Corey Schreppel, and contains original music by Dan Powell.

Special thanks to Hans Butow. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bavaro. See you tomorrow.