The Importance and Science of Aroma
By Mayukh Mittal
How many times has it been, that you’re walking down the street and suddenly you smell something delicious from a nearby shop and it rouses your appetite; that’s the power of aroma.
Eating food is a sensory process, the visual(presentation), tactile(texture) and olfactory(aroma) senses all combine to make this experience worthwhile, while the visual and tactile senses are important, I feel the most important sense that can make or break the experience of consumption is…you guessed it, aroma.
Picture this, you ordered a bowl of curry rice, it comes out of the kitchen well plated, it’s a pleasure for the eyes, you bend forward to take in the aroma but something isn’t right, it doesn’t smell like it used to, and your meal is lowkey ruined. That is what aroma can do.
Scientifically speaking, the process of digestion begins even before food enters your mouth, the aroma of food reaches your nose and the brain triggers the production of saliva waiting to digest the food as soon as it enters your mouth, thus aroma yet again plays a vital role in it.
The human nose can identify up to 10,000 different aromas while you can only taste 5 (sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami). Thus what you perceive of tastes comes more from the nose than from the tongue.
“The three chemical senses in the oro-nasal cavity are olfaction (sense of smell activated by many volatile compounds), taste sensitivity (gustation, salty, sweet, sour, bitter, umami) and trigeminal sensitivity (tingling, pungent, hot),” Thomas-Danguin said. “They combine in the brain, owing to the so-called multimodal integration process, to form a perceptual object called ‘flavour.’ Food flavour is the combination of odour, taste, and trigeminal sensation.”
Scientists estimate that up to 90% of what we perceive as flavour is derived from our sense of smell. That may seem like a disproportionate amount but let’s put it in context: when you have a blocked nose on account of hay fever or a cold, foods tend to lose their flavour, although we say we can’t ‘taste’ our food, we can taste saltiness, sweetness, sourness etc. It is, in fact, our lack of ability to detect aromas render the food to be bland.
“The one who can control aroma can control it all.”- Hayama Akira(Anime :D)
Aromas not only enhance flavour, but they can also enhance mood. Since the 1920s, scientists have noted powerful, mood-enhancing effects from such “comfort” aromas as cinnamon and clove.
There has been tons of research going on in the field of aroma and its impact on the taste and overall experience of eating food. It truly is remarkable how the nose has the power to affect what we eat and make a memory out of that smell, like when certain smells just take you back in time to the good old days :))
What could be better than coming home to the smell of your favourite dish cooking on the stove or in the oven? For me, this would have to be the scent of plain white basmati rice. I can’t specifically say this is related to nostalgia or childhood memories, it’s just an aroma that gets my gastric juices flowing and opens up my appetite, something I believe most readers will be able to relate to with their own food of choice.
In the end, all I have left to write is that food is a multi-sensory experience… Or is it??
