michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

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Yesterday, we told the story of a rare but severe symptom of long Covid. A far more common symptom is the long-term loss of smell. Today, my colleague, Times restaurant critic Tejal Rao, recounts the quest to try to get hers back. It’s Tuesday, March 23.

tejal rao

I was in the bathroom at my home in Los Angeles. And I was stepping into the shower. And I smelled something really unfamiliar. I thought maybe it was stagnant water or the plastic of the shower cap that I was wearing to cover my hair. I thought maybe it was the stone tiles, like had someone else just cleaned the bathroom? I couldn’t figure it out. And then after a few minutes, I realized it was actually a blank. There was no smell. I had just lost my sense of smell, just like that. And I still went ahead and took a shower. But the whole time, I was sort of thinking, how soon can I get a test for— how soon can I get tested for Covid? I had very mild symptoms. It was just a rough flu or a cold. I was exhausted. And my parents kept checking in, kept calling to remind me to eat. But I’ve never experienced a loss of appetite like that before. Any kind of meat made me feel a little bit queasy. So roast chicken, which is a real comfort food for me normally, was just very, very squishy. And popcorn was like foam but with sharp bits in it, like so unpleasant all of a sudden. Everything about it that’s a joy was very unpleasant. I started to feel better in early to mid-January. I didn’t have to pass out and sleep for half the day. I could get back to work. But I still couldn’t really smell anything. Smell is just— it’s so crucial to taste, which means it’s really crucial to everything that I do. I work as a restaurant critic, but I also develop recipes. And it’s really difficult to cook without a sense of smell if you’re not used to it. You don’t know what’s going on. It’s almost like wearing a blindfold.

archived recording (kemar lalor) If you lost your taste buds, I’m going to show you guys how to get it back real quick.

tejal rao

I started looking up what people were doing to get back their sense of smell or different kinds of aromatherapies. And I came across this TikTok video that had gone viral for a home remedy.

archived recording (kemar lalor) You want to take a nice, fresh orange and burn all the way around. Make sure it’s dark, charcoal, black, black—

tejal rao

This guy, Kemar Lalor, uploaded it.

archived recording (kemar lalor) What you want to do after that is cut it, slice it down the middle.

tejal rao

Burn an orange, a whole orange with the peel still on. You burn it. You take the— take the peel off. And then you mash the hot pulp of the orange with a little sugar and you eat it with a spoon.

archived recording (kemar lalor) I’m no scientist, but it does work. I’m telling you, this is some Jamaican remedies. It’s going to work. I promise you.

tejal rao

So I thought I would give it a try.

archived recording (tejal rao) OK, so I’ve got these tiny oranges. They’re so tiny. They’re falling through the crate.

tejal rao

Charring an orange according to Kemar’s TikTok video was the big event at my house that day. It was my partner, myself, our two dogs. We were all in the kitchen.

archived recording This is a great way to spend a— what day is it? archived recording (tejal rao) I have no idea. It’s Tuesday. archived recording No, it’s not. archived recording (tejal rao) It’s Wednesday.

tejal rao

I think the dogs were probably wondering what we were doing. They were getting very annoyed. But we stood over the gas stove and charred some oranges—

archived recording (tejal rao) The peel’s coming off really easily.

tejal rao

—and tried to follow his instructions as closely as we could. I knew that it was a TikTok video. It wasn’t a scientific paper that I had read. But I was secretly really hopeful that it would work.

archived recording (tejal rao) I can’t smell it.

tejal rao

And it was still— things were still really muted, still really flat. So I called up Kemar— that’s the guy who made the TikTok— to see if maybe I was doing it wrong. He was inside his car, parked outside his family restaurant where he works.

kemar lalor We’re located in Ontario, Toronto.

tejal rao

They sell goat curry and oxtail and roti.

kemar lalor Jerk chicken, oxtail, curry goat, some nice rice, all that good stuff. tejal rao Curry goat— ah, that sounds so good. kemar lalor Yeah.

tejal rao

And he was so optimistic. And I told him that it didn’t exactly work for me. At least it didn’t work the way it was advertised, like it would cure me in an hour.

kemar lalor I say give it another try. Roast it again. Roast it for 12 minutes, though.

tejal rao

He said that I should try it every day.

kemar lalor [INAUDIBLE]. tejal rao OK. kemar lalor Like 12 minutes. And make sure to eat it hot. tejal rao OK, got it.

tejal rao

And then he asked if I wanted to speak to his mom, who taught it to him. And I thought yes. I’d love to speak to your mom. And he’s like “Mom?”

tejal rao Hi, Trudy-Ann.

tejal rao

And she came out and was equally positive and joyful—

trudy-ann lalor I’m blessed. Thank you very much.

tejal rao

—and so thrilled that her family remedy had traveled all around the world and people were trying it, even if it hadn’t worked for everyone.

trudy-ann lalor OK, back home in Jamaica, my mom would give us— to us children then, because she have 15 kids. And when we are sick and we don’t have any taste, any kind of stuff there, she just roasts the orange and put the sugar on it and tell us to eat it. So we get back our taste and stuff and then we start to eat, because that’s what it’s supposed to do, get but your sense. It’s like it’s sending something to your brain to reboost it.

tejal rao

So the orange remedy didn’t work as advertised for me. But the thing that Trudy-Ann said, that the brain needs some kind of reboost, that got me wondering, what is the connection between the brain and the nose?

dr. pamela dalton Hello? tejal rao Hi, Pam. It’s Tejal from The New York Times. dr. pamela dalton Oh, hi, Tejal. How are you?

tejal rao

I did a little bit of research and I found a place called the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. They do lots of different kinds of research on smell and on taste. And I connected with a research scientist there, Dr. Pamela Dalton.

dr. pamela dalton Well, I’m a basic research scientist who studies how people use their sense of smell.

tejal rao

And she studies, among many, many other things, the ways that emotions can change the way we smell things.

dr. pamela dalton Generally when you lose your sense of smell under most circumstances, it’s because the molecules actually can’t get into the olfactory receptor area of the nose because of congestion. Covid is different in that way, because most people who lost their sense of smell did so without having any nasal congestion whatsoever.

tejal rao

Pam explained that during the pandemic, millions and millions of people lost their sense of smell just in an instant.

dr. pamela dalton It was just like a light bulb got turned off or a switch got flicked to off. And one moment they could smell. And the next moment, nothing smelled.

tejal rao

And even though that’s how we lose our sense of smell, that’s not how we get it back. There’s not a switch that just turns it back on.

dr. pamela dalton We don’t really understand how this system uses coding to develop all of the different smells that our brain is able to understand.

tejal rao

So much of what we think of as taste is actually happening in your nose and brain. It’s your smell receptors. You have 400 smell receptors. And they’re all working to identify millions and millions, the estimate is a trillion smells.

dr. pamela dalton That then is sort of a readout for the brain to say oh, those five types of cells that are activated mean I’m smelling a flower versus a pizza or coffee in the morning.

tejal rao

But another thing she told me that made me feel a little optimistic is that olfactory receptor neurons are constantly regenerating every few weeks.

dr. pamela dalton Now, you as an adult have memories of what things should smell like. And that’s why we think the olfactory retraining may actually help, because you’re connecting the central input, your representation of what your coffee should smell like, with the incoming molecular signals.

tejal rao

Smells are connected to memories and moods and feelings. One way of thinking about it is that there’s this map in your brain that you can follow to get smells back. But if your sense of smell has been gone for a long time, if you lose that map, it’s more like starting from scratch.

dr. pamela dalton It’s almost like if there’s some— if there’s some map intact, they can follow the right map to make the right connections. If it’s completely gone, they’re just wiring— rewiring haphazardly.

tejal rao

So I was really hopeful after talking with Pam that maybe there would be some way to find my way back to smelling by doing this thing called olfactory training or smell training. I just needed to learn how to actually do it.

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back.

chrissi kelly I think most people don’t understand what smell training is. And I could sum that up by saying it’s not what your nose does, but rather what your brain does with the stimulation.

tejal rao

I called Chrissi Kelly, who founded AbScent in the UK. And that’s AbScent, as in smell.

chrissi kelly I remember when I got 100 people on my Facebook group, which was called smell training, thinking oh my God, this— wow, that’s amazing.

tejal rao

And she started this online community.

chrissi kelly And now we have 22,900, so there are a lot of us now.

tejal rao

And she lost her sense of smell back in 2012 after some kind of viral infection. And at that time, doctors didn’t really recommend anything. But she read some research about smell training and how repetitive, structured sessions, smelling just four scents could potentially help people start to orient themselves again, pick up smells again.

chrissi kelly I quickly got to the point where being a student of my affliction was better than being a victim of my affliction. And it became an absolute passion.

tejal rao

I wanted to formally learn what a smell training session should look like. And it’s so much more like therapy than I expected it to be.

chrissi kelly There is so much anxiety about getting it right in the beginning that I just think it’s really valuable to say OK, this is the program. Start with this.

tejal rao

So kind of like therapy, smell training works best if you’re in a quiet space where you feel safe, where you can focus and think. I sat down at my little desk in my office at home with a box of spices.

chrissi kelly OK, and now for the first jar, I just want you to sit there with it with no expectations.

tejal rao

So she asked me to get four spices and not open them all immediately, open them one at a time.

chrissi kelly OK, so hold it up to your nose.

tejal rao

And I had cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, cumin.

chrissi kelly And I want you to just shut yourself down completely.

tejal rao

I think what she was saying is turn off the thoughts that are analyzing what’s happening right now and just be in the moment.

chrissi kelly And just take little— I call them bunny sniffs, tiny little sniffs.

tejal rao

When I was smelling without her, when I was smelling on my own, I was taking these deep breaths and trying to pull the aromas into my body. And that actually— that doesn’t work that well. So Chrissi suggested bunny sniffs, which is taking these teeny, tiny, little sniffs of air, consecutive little sniffs.

chrissi kelly [SNIFFING] Then you pause and then take a breath, because we don’t want you to faint. And then go back to it again.

tejal rao

And I was immediately ready to say I can’t smell them very well. It’s kind of like the cloves were in the next room. And I could hear them a little bit, like I could pick up a word every now and then, but I didn’t know exactly what they were talking about.

chrissi kelly OK, so don’t judge yet.

tejal rao

And before I could complain, Chrissi asked me to kind of slow down, take my time.

chrissi kelly Don’t say oh, that was good or that wasn’t good or I didn’t get anything. Just sit with it. OK, the second one—

tejal rao

The second scent that we smelled together was a jar of whole cardamom pods. Cardamom is a really familiar smell to me. It’s part of the reason I picked it to be part of my smell kit. My mom uses it mostly paired with meat. Like in lamb biryani, there’s often cardamom, or in masala chai, in tea with— boiled with spices and ginger. It’s just a really familiar, delicate, floral scent.

chrissi kelly OK.

tejal rao

So Chrissi had me open the lid of the cardamom jar. And she told me to close my eyes.

chrissi kelly I want you to imagine that you are looking into a really deep well—

tejal rao

—so deep that you don’t know when the coin you toss in is going to hit the bottom, and to just keep listening.

chrissi kelly So imagine that you are waiting and waiting and waiting. And people who have lost their sense of smell, I think that we smell more slowly.

tejal rao

Chrissi used the term “listening” a lot when we were talking about smelling. It’s like you’re leaning in and you’re trying to pick up as much as you can.

chrissi kelly So smell is instantaneous for healthy people. And I think it takes a longer time for us to receive, for the receptors to work, and to feed that into the brain.

tejal rao

You throw the coin in and you wait, and to apply that to sniffing the cardamom pods.

chrissi kelly And just keep listening. So let’s give that one a go.

tejal rao

I’d forgotten that my grandfather, my mom’s father, used to chew cardamom pods until I was doing this exercise, I think maybe to freshen his breath. I don’t know why he did that but. He was my favorite grandparent. We were very close. And he always smelled like cardamom. He died a few years ago. And when I was in the middle of this exercise, I remembered it. And it opened up all these other memories that were connected to that.

chrissi kelly All the tasks that we’re doing right now— the concentrating, the thinking, the waiting, the anticipation— all of those things are cognitive processes that happen higher up in the olfactory brain.

tejal rao

I think of it more like a car that’s passing me on the street with the windows open blasting a song and you just hear a tiny snippet of the song. And it takes you a while to recognize it, like you know this song came out that one summer that you wore those denim cut-off shorts and you were hanging out with your best friend. And you definitely sang it at karaoke. And it’s so familiar. It’s right on the tip of your tongue, but you just can’t get it. And then maybe 10 minutes later, you remember the name of the song. When Chrissi and I got to the end of our smell-training session, she told me it’s really about building confidence. More than anything else, it’s about building up your confidence. And before I spoke to Chrissi, I’d imagined smell training as being closer to going to the gym or really cool, really active, really fun. I’d sort of imagined— so embarrassing— I’d sort of imagined the Rocky theme song playing and I’m in a cool tracksuit and I’m jogging through Los Angeles. And it’s so boring and lonely to just sit and smell and think. It can be kind of disheartening. If you have a good day and then you have a bad day, it feels like you’re going backwards.

chrissi kelly I don’t think that the word recovery is a good one to use, because smell loss is an injury. So you recover from an illness. But an injury might leave you with some lasting scarring. So if you were in a car accident and you were really badly banged up and had to have surgery or had scars somewhere, you wouldn’t say “when am I going to recover from this?” You would say “when are my scars going to heal?”

tejal rao

You don’t just go from hurt to healed overnight. And that’s what smell is like. You don’t just go back to normal. It’s more like adjusting and learning how to live in a new space. That’s really just the beginning. The smell training doesn’t have a distinct timeline. I have been very tempted to stop, because it’s really, really tedious. But over the weekend, I got a ladder out of the garage and propped it up against the lemon tree in my front yard. And they have this amazing floral, fruity perfume. And I notice that the leaves, too, I could smell the leaves. And there’s something about it that feels new, too. It feels so vivid. And I feel so grateful for it. In a way, I think I’m just paying much closer attention to it than I used to.

michael barbaro

After two months, Tejal reports that her sense of smell has finally returned. We’ll be right back. Here’s what else you need to know today.

archived recording We had a very tragic incident today here at the King Soopers. There was loss of life. We have multiple people who were killed in this incident.

michael barbaro

On Monday afternoon, a gunman opened fire at a grocery store in a residential neighborhood of Boulder, Colorado, killing 10 people, including a police officer. The suspected shooter is in custody, but the police have not described a motive. It was the second mass shooting in less than a week, following the murder of eight people at spas in and around Atlanta, Georgia. And The Times reports that on top of his nearly $2 trillion stimulus package, President Biden is preparing to recommend spending as much as $3 trillion on a sweeping set of new programs, beginning with a giant infrastructure plan. That plan calls for investing in roads, bridges, and rail lines, broadband internet for rural communities, charging stations for electric cars, and the construction of 1 million affordable housing units. To pay for it, Biden is expected to propose raising taxes on corporations, a tactic that is already meeting resistance from congressional Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell.

archived recording (mitch mcconnell) I think the Trojan horse will be called infrastructure. But inside the Trojan horse will be all the tax increases.

michael barbaro

Biden may seek to pass his infrastructure plan through a legislative process known as reconciliation that bypasses the need for Republican support in the Senate and requires just 51 votes rather than the usual 60.

archived recording (mitch mcconnell) So yeah. I fully expect that’s what they’ll try to do, and that’s because I don’t think there’s going to be any enthusiasm on our side for a tax increase.

michael barbaro

Source: New York Times

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