The Chemosensitive Organ

Diving off the deep end, I had an olfactory moment the other night that was a bit amazing, a bit scary. Amazing because I may have unlocked a new dimension of olfactory experience for myself, scary because I might be detecting the first real glimpse of neurological dysfunction that awaits my aged, exasperated mind.

Smells are like that. There are moments when I catch a whiff that is so faint, and so impossible to detect (like the mold that grows on the metal of your umbrella), that I often have to consider the myriad olfactory hallucinations that beset our chemosensitive organ, of which there are many.

It was a hot summer night. The crazy smell experiences always start out like that. Odors love heat, because evaporation is what makes them mobile; heat is the odor motor, if you will.

On this hot, sweaty night, I was eating dinner, hot and sweaty, resting my arms on my high-topped table, when I became fussed over the cleanliness of the surface of my table. My resting forearms sheathed in a thin film of slightly sticky, waxy sebum, and my tabletop layered in a similar compound from previous nights of the same scenario. "I need to clean this damn table. It's gross."

I try to keep my arms off the table. But it's a high top, and it's more comfortable for me to hunch over my bowl of gruel, resting on the underside of my forearms. I keep losing the battle, touching my sticky gross arms to the sticky gross table, then remembering not to, sitting straight up, only to capitulate again moments later.

All the while, I'm sampling my dinner, and very thoughtfully. I tried a new recipe last night, and today are the leftovers. The leftovers always taste different, and for some things, even better. The lemon juice in the marinade, the Maillard on the cast iron; What happened there? I used soy sauce and lime last time. What's the difference now? The acid, more sour; The surface texture, less caramelized. I am thinking, but with my mouth, my nose, lost in gustatory, olfactory thought. Shit! Dirty sticky table! And then it happened. Mid-bite, mid-thought, I could smell the table with my forearm.

That's right, mid-bite, the sensations of my dinner coalesced with the sensations of my forearms, and all of the sudden I could taste the table. Not even sure how to describe the taste, it didn't last long enough. My friend who knows a bit about these things says it's synaesthesia, hallucination. I'm not sure. I don't recall ever reading or hearing about this, but the science of smell is more mystery than science.

Our skin is covered in sensory receptors. Our olfactory cortex is entwined with our immune system. There is a hell of a lot going on here. I'm convinced that the reason I can smell mold in ways nobody else seems to be able to is because I trained (inadvertently through paranoia) my immune system in concert with my olfactory system to recognize it, and after a severe and prolonged exposure event in a basement apartment. The two -- immune and olfactory system -- now work together to alert me to its presence in the most impossibly minute airborne concentrations.

And now, I am suspicious that it goes way deeper. Then again, as I said at the outset, I may be slowly and steadily rolling into cognitive decline, my neural tendrils twisting, knotting, brittle and breaking. At least I'm taking notes.

Notes:
Pattern recognition receptor (PRR)   
A receptor present on the surface of keratinocytes and other cells of the innate immune system that recognizes microbe-specific molecules that are recognized by a given PRR are called pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) and include fungal glucans...They are also called primitive pattern recognition receptors because they evolved before other parts of the immune system, particularly before adaptive immunity...The innate immune system is an older evolutionary defense strategy, relatively speaking, and it is the dominant immune system response found in plants, fungi, insects, and primitive multicellular organisms. 

Be a Bad Beer Expert

Airflow

Today we're talking about beer taints. Yup, beer taints. Sure this has to do with flavor* but right in the middle of my poking-around for info on the "smell of rain," I seduced by this lexicon of bad beer problems that you can buy to help you make better beer, and just to be a better beer drinker in general. (If I can recognize more of the features of the beer I'm drinking, does that make me a better beer drinker?)

Another term synonymous with beer taint is staling compounds, or simply "off-flavors." Regardless, oxidization is the culprit. In fact, oxygen messes up lots of things, like apples, avocados, and even your body. (You know the old joke of how "Scumbag Oxygen" is required for you to live, yet kills you slowly.)

In beer, oxidization can happen for all kinds of reasons, from air trapped in the head space before putting the cap on, to how long it's been in the bottle, to the storage conditions.

The bottom line is, we want beer to taste good, so if you're making it, we want you to know how to recognize the bad stuff. That's where the test kits come in.

It seems like the concept isn't too old, starting maybe circa 1995 by a gentleman named Dr Bill Simpson working at the Brewing Research Foundation in England.

I'm getting all this at the AROXA site. They make flavor standards and sensory software for beverages. And for beer taints.

I'm taking the following lexicon from their beer taint kit. However, I'm adding some descriptions from a few things I found elsewhere; these extras are separated by a semicolon. And I'm doing this because sensory lexicons are great. This one doesn't have any common names (except for Geosmin), but we'll have something to say about that below.

AROXA (etc) Beer Taint Kit:

2,6-dichlorophenol

“Chlorophenol, like antiseptic mouthwash”

Geosmin

“geosmin, like sugar beets or damp soil”

2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine

“Earthy, like green pepper"

2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine

“Earthy, like potato skins or dug soil”

p-menthane-8-thiol-3-one

"Catty, like blackcurrant juice or tom cat urine"; 2,5-dimethylpyrazine - catty, tomato plant

2-methylisoborneol

“Earthy, mouldy, like peat or compost”

sodium bicarbonate

“Alkaline, like caustic or detergent”

2,4,6-tribromoanisole

"Musty, like corked wine with a rubbery overtone”

2,4,6-trichloroanisole

“Musty, like corked wine or a damp cellar”

trans-2-nonenal

"papery" at the threshold concentration, "cucumbery and green-malty" at twice that value, and "fatty and leathery" at three times the threshold value; I'm adding this although it's not on the AROXA list, because it shows how different concentrations affect perception.

acetoin

"moldy, earthy, tobacco-like;" and this one because it is an oxidized form of humulene.

Dr. Morten Meilgaard’s Beer Flavor Wheel, 1970s

AROXA has all kinds of flavor standards; I'm only copying the ones for bad beer.

FlavorActiv is another name I should mention, being that they declare themselves the global beverage industry standard for sensory needs since 1996, and have something to do with AROXA.

They make reference standards as well, and have a lexicon of 57 flavors.

And finally, I have to add my favorite word found on this topic - Lightstruck! It's another word for "skunked."

 *Let's not forget, however, that most of what we taste is smell. If it's not from the sweet-salty-bitter-etc profile, it's smell we're talking about. But we'll let this slide.

Post Script

Other important entities in the beverage industry:

Camden BRI - providing practical scientific, technical, regulatory and information support (also selling a beer taint recognition kit)

Siebel Institute of Technology - in the North American yeast-brewing business since 1872 providing all kinds of services (also have sensory training kits)

Here's a book about all this:

Food Taints and Off-Flavours

MJ Saxby, 1996

And you can't talk about beer without mentioning coffee:

World Coffee Research's Sensory Lexicon

(Yet I leave out all the wine stuff for another day!)

Secrets of Flavor

In Hidden Scents, I downplayed the clandestine nature of the flavor and fragrance industry, but it is a big part of the language of smell. This was actually one of the things that motivated me to write the book. Not only is smell (and flavor) inherently evasive to language, but the industries that work with these senses are required to keep their work under wraps.

Well, I guess they aren’t required to keep it secret, but they do, and because of the way this particular industry works. Food, as well as fashion, is not protected by copyright law. If you want to make a song, you can be sure that your hard work will pay off, because your song will be protected by copyright, which means that nobody else can say it’s theirs, and only you can reap the benefits. In flavor, fragrance, and fashion, that is not the case. You can’t copyright the Bernardo sandal (surely, they would have). So how else do you protect your hard work? You keep it a secret.

On a side note, I was in the Firmenich flavor plant in Newark, NJ, and our tour guide says that they have research facilities all over the place (primarily NJ, since this is the artificial flavor capital of the world), but that nobody knows where they are, and that you wouldn’t even notice if they were right next door, and in fact even he doesn’t know where they are.

So in short, these experts are expected to be secretive about their work; they have to. Still, it is one of the main obstacles in learning about the language we use to describe these flavors and fragrances – if we can’t even know what it is, how can we describe it? And as I’ve pointed out before, there are public arts funds for visual art and for music, but none for flavor/fragrance.* This guarantees that our public knowledge and public discourse about these topics are mediated by the commercial industry and not by our own personal, social experiences with them.

Flavorists, Experts in the Field of Natural and Artificial Flavoring, Work in Top Secret New Jersey Labs

March 2017, njmonthly  

“It’s a pretty secretive industry,” says Steve Ruocco, president of the Society of Flavor Chemists and a master flavorist at Maryland-based McCormick, the spice company. “You can’t disclose who your customers are,” because secret flavor formulas are often the bread and butter of the food and beverage manufacturers that hire flavor houses to innovate or improve their products. The formulas are what separate Hunt’s ketchup from Heinz and Skippy peanut butter from Jif.

*I would never neglect the only exception to this, the Institute for Art and Olfaction, based in Los Angeles. Started by the inimitable Saskia Wilson-Brown, the institute experiments and educates with scent to allow the public access to a world that is completely taken over by consumerism, and thus off-limits to those without the money to participate.

POST SCRIPT

Can’t talk about this topic of artificial flavors without mentioning Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, 2001. Great way to get inside the hi-tech flavor game (I say hi-tech, knowing the book is almost 20 years old; I’m sure there’ve been lots of developments since).

POST POST SCRIPT

The Bernardo sandal? Yes, this thing which I assume everyone takes for granted as having been a part of “fashion” for as long as people had two feet, is actually credited to Bernard Rudofsky and Berta Rudofsky. He was an architect and wrote the book, Are Clothes Modern, after curating a show at the MoMA by the same name. She was a teacher at the Black Mountain College, a school focused on the arts, and one known for producing influential people (Buckminster Fuller was a big name) in the art world and beyond, despite its short life. One summer they came up with this sandal, and it has completely taken over the world of open-toe footwear ever since. Perhaps, like Jonas Salk with his penicillin discovery, they may have given it away for free, as in, “how do you patent the sun?” But who knows. Bottom line, they couldn’t do it if they wanted, because you can’t copyright fashion.

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