“It was black bean paste with almonds and turmeric pieces and I was like ‘I don’t eat it, it’s disgusting,'” said Sarah Yeats, 31, an emergency nurse from Atlantic Beach, Florida.
The couple both work at a hospital in Jacksonville, Florida, and she contracted Covid-19 at work and brought it home in August.
Like many people who got the coronavirus, they noticed shortly after testing positive that they had lost much of their sense of smell and taste.
For weeks, they encouraged all the feelings they could get from food by tossing chicken in lemon juice, tossing fistfuls of fresh herbs into soups and salads, and getting daring with textures in an effort to bring excitement to the table.
The day Sarah noticed that she no longer found turmeric pieces on top of pasta acceptable, she said she realized that her sense of taste might come up again.
Anosmia – a condition known as ‘odor blindness’, or loss of smell, is a common symptom of Covid-19 (and other viruses) and can have a serious effect on people’s taste, because the senses interwoven.
“It appears that loss of odor or taste is one of the most specific indicators of Covid-19, especially early indicators,” said Dr. Leana Wen, medical analyst at CNN, said. “Even without any other symptoms, including congestion, (Covid-19 patients) report that they cannot smell or taste.”
And although most people regain their sense of smell or taste within days to weeks, Wen said, “there are still many who have not regained their sense of smell after months.”
Of course, people still have to eat, so they change their meals.
To put new flavor combinations on the table
A few days after she tested positive for the virus in mid-December, Althea Mullarkey, 53, suddenly realized she could no longer smell the strong gardenia scent of her shampoo.
She tears through the house, sniffs everything she can find, and realizes that her sense of smell has disappeared.
The self-described foodie who lives in the Hudson Valley in New York said she no longer likes the mouthfeel of eggs because she can not taste them. And she does not want to waste her blunt taste on a good piece of blue cheese, a former favorite.
Recently, Mullarkey said, she ate a leftover “spicy-sweet coleslaw with pork” for breakfast. Her dinner turned into lemon-dill hummus with more lemon, a side of pitted kalamata olives and a piece of roasted naan with spicy oil.
“I can taste the salt and pepper and lemon, and I like the crispy textures,” Mullarkey said, but not one of the low flavors she liked to experiment with in the kitchen.
“Some sensations of our food – spicy peppers, mintiness – are things we experience with the hot and cold sensors of our mouths,” she said. “You can get acid, heat, even saltiness, but not the low things like coriander and chipotle.”
Most of our sense of what we consider to be taste, Becker said, is not really tasty at all.
“All the interesting things we use to identify things like cheese and fruit and chocolate and coffee are not done with our mouths,” she said. “They’re done with our noses.”
“We do not think it is very common for people to lose their sense of taste (with Covid-19). If you really drill down, it is the olfactory function in the nose that does not work.”
This may explain why texture, color and even rituals around cooking have now become more important to some people.
“Texture has become much more important to me,” said Alex Yeats, 42. He and Sarah eat salmon several times a week because it has a fuller, more umami body and a better mouthfeel than a white white fish, which ‘just tastes’ dry. ‘
“I wanted to make sure there was green in everything,” Sarah said. “Foods that are white and gray are just as unattractive now.”
By planning in the processes of cooking and meals each week, it helped her maintain interest in food preparation. “Because Covid inspired us to use our raclette oven, it’s a cooking process that makes it delicious.”
When strange smells are a promising sign
Ghost scents are a common topic in online Covid-19 support groups.
Even a few months since their diagnosis, the couple found airplanes and cigarette smoke where there were none. Mullarkey said she smelled such intense phantom smoke and ash smells, and it almost stung her.
According to Becker, this is promising news.
“A lot of people get trash, or smoke, something that’s rotten or rubber that burns,” Becker said of the ghostly scents his patients noticed. “It’s really rough, but it’s usually a good sign that things are trying to fix themselves. If recovery occurs, the wires can sometimes be crossed.”
Although it is still unknown why people lose their sense of smell with Covid-19, Wen said, “it is thought that the coronavirus does not affect nerve cells that control the smell, but rather the cells around them.”
It is also considered good news for recovery, as supporting cells regenerate more easily than neurons.
“If the cells grow again, it may take a while and retraining to return to normal,” she said.
Fragrance training can help
Re-training her sense of smell is something Kaya Cheshire, who said she’s still missing 90% of her sense of smell since she contracted a mild case of Covid-19 in July, has tried it, along with adding many more herbs and spices as usual. to her food.
“It’s so nostalgic to cook food,” she said. “The addition of lemon or cloves and those aromatic things, improves everything and makes me feel like I don’t miss that much, even though I know.”
At the suggestion of her doctor, Cheshire recently started ‘fragrance training’ by using things like rose, lemons, cloves, garlic, eucalyptus and menthols with a very strong scent to retrain her brain.
“I try to think about how things used to smell so I can remember it and recognize the scent again,” she said.
Becker said this is a tactic she recommends for patients as there is no cure for anosmia.
“It’s a little mysterious to retrain your brain to how things smell so you can remember,” she said. “But using memory to retrain the neurons can work in both directions. The memory can help you smell, and the smell can help you remember.”
And you do not need a fancy essential oil set, she said. “Use only the things you need to fit in, and match the memory of your scent.”
It can also be something aromatic and nostalgic for dinner.
Sarah Yeats – who got most of her sense of smell and taste, but not all – recently made a bowl of ramen full of coriander and green onions in a rich sauce.
“I try to serve food that looks tastier and more beautiful,” she said.
For her husband, Alex, the dish was a kind of memory.
“Since I remember how it smells and tastes, I can imagine it, and it’s useful,” he said.