"smells" news and stories

Even though it sounded like a promising idea, activists for the "scent sensitive" have gotten the chocolate chip scent banned from bus shelters after only one day! These complainers - oops, I mean activists - claimed that the smells could potentially trigger an asthma attack, although there were no cases of such things occurring. CBS Outdoor, the company that put up the scented strips for the California Milk Processor Board's campaign, said that the strips used no chemicals and that there was no way that they could have directly triggered any allergic reactions, although they are complying with the city's request to take them down.

Honestly, if you can't handle the scent of chocolate chip cookies, how on earth can you handle taking a bus in a big city? Do these activists actually walk around San Francisco? It's not the cleanest-smelling city in the world. Besides, in just about any city the scent of chocolate chip cookies would be an improvement over exhaust, sewer and trash fumes. Perhaps they found the scent to be too appealing and were actually worried that cookie cravings would cause people to hyperventilate in excitement. Or maybe they were worried that their own cravings would make them blow their diets the next time they walked by a bakery.

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It's (almost) always fun when someone holds a mirror up to our daily routine. The Sydney Morning Herald recently ran a piece that categorizes the ways people eat in office environments. I don't know that I'm familiar with the folks that eat cereal throughout their workday, but I can definitely relate to the image of folks creating mini assembly lines for sandwiches and salads at their desks, as well as those with a seemingly endless supply of plastic snack tubs. The myriad of smells that come out of a high-traffic office microwave also gets a nod, as does the offensive tuna can left to stink in the trash.

New research demonstrates that the brain reacts differently to scent depending on whether it is drawn in by mouth or by nose, finally giving evidence to support why sommeliers taste wine by sniffing, then slurping. Scientists tested four smells; chocolate, lavendar, and two chemicals. Chocolate was the only one which strongly activated two different regions of the brain. The researchers posit that our brain picks out food smells as being different from non-food smells early on, but say that they need to do more foodie sniff tests to learn more.

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