Dr. Piesse errs in saying that the sense of taste can and should be
educated. It needs no educating; sweet is distinguished from sour, salt
and bitter from the earliest infancy, and that is all there is to it.
The sense of smell, on the other hand, can and should be educated
systematically. Kant's reason for saying that it is not worth
cultivating was that, in populous regions, particularly, there are
more disagreeable than agreeable odors. He might as well have advised
against educating the eyes and the ears because in our cities there
are more offensive sights and sounds than agreeable ones. An educated
sense of smell objects to malodorous surroundings and therefore prompts
sanitary reforms. Much has been done in this direction since the days
of Kant. The next reform will be to absolutely demand clean, sweet air
in schools, theaters, and concert halls.
The principal reason for educating the sense of smell is to protect us
against the danger of eating spoiled food, and to enable us thoroughly
to enjoy the countless pleasures of the table--dwelt on in this
book--on which a good appetite depends. The significance of this was
understood by Shakespeare when he wrote:
Now good digestion wait on appetite
And health on both.
Ants are the most intelligent of all insects. Their antennæ are organs
of smell and so much is their world a world of odors that, as Sir John
Lubbock ascertained, an ant accidentally born without antennæ seemed
to be as helpless as a blind person among ourselves. Many mammals are
greatly dependent on this sense, and there was a time when a large
part of the human brain was assigned to its perceptions. More and more
the impressions of sight gained on it. The process has gone too far;
we must once more strengthen and develop our olfactory nerves and
encourage the expansion of the olfactory region in the brain.
The way to do it has been dwelt on repeatedly in the preceding pages.
I have taught several persons who were partly anosmic to learn after a
short time to distinguish between different foods that had previously
"tasted" alike to them; they simply followed my advice of breathing
out _slowly and consciously_ through the nose while eating. Keep
those two words--particularly _consciously_--in mind. Never eat in an
absent-minded way; and if you are a host or a hostess, _please_ do not
tell your guest interesting stories at the moment when he is trying to
do justice to the good things you have placed before him!
Children should be told every time they bolt their food or candy that
the pleasure of eating lies not in the swallowing of it, but in keeping
it in the mouth as long as possible and breathing out through the nose.
That will make epicures of them, able to tell good food from bad and
thus escape many an illness.
How acute the sense of smell can be made is shown by the fact that it
will perceive and distinguish the 1,300,000th part of a grain of attar
of roses. It is said that the inmates of an asylum for the blind, whose
other senses are sharpened by the loss of sight, can tell on entering a
dining-room what viands are on the table.
_De gustibus non est disputandum._ True; we are all entitled to
our likes and dislikes; but many "differences of taste" are simply
differences in development and acuteness of the sense of smell. To
those in whom this sense is blunted, sweet (unsalted) butter may _seem_
insipid; but should they maintain that it _is_ insipid?
To Turner a man once said he could not see in nature such colors as he
used on his canvases. The great painter promptly replied: "Don't you
wish you could?"
Epicures are usually born with a keen sense of smell. Once, in crossing
a bleak pass in the Alps, I said to my companion: "I smell an orchid!"
After considerable search we found it--a tiny blossom--some ten feet
from the road. That orchid explains why I have written this book.