Children need to be better educated about scents, because smell is not just a secondary sense, but a way of understanding the world, memory, food, danger and even ourselves. This is the argument made by the historian of scents, Dr. Will Tullett, of the University of York, according to whom schools should teach children to “engage their nose” as naturally as they learn to see, read or describe colors.
Pollution can damage our sense of smell, he says, while modern life is artificially altering our relationship with scents. Many things around us, from margarine to car interiors and even our homes, have been stripped of their natural scent and “re-perfumed” with synthetic fragrances. The question, Tullett says, is what this explosion of artificial scents does to our ability to distinguish the true nuances of odors.
He proposes a kind of olfactory education that can start in school, but also at home. Children can be encouraged to smell more things, fruits, spices, books, wood, soil, food, clothes, markets, different spaces. The more we smell, the more we enrich the vocabulary with which we describe the world. Sommeliers, he reminds us, do exactly that: they walk through markets, smell everything and build an archive of aromatic memories.
Smell is not just sensory poetry. It also has a practical function. A simple example is food safety: the ability to tell whether a food is still fresh or should be thrown away, without relying solely on the expiration date. But the connection goes deeper. Numerous studies have shown that the ability to taste aromas is strongly linked to psychological well-being, while the loss of smell is often associated with anxiety, depression, and other symptoms.
Tullett disputes the idea that people don't value smell. Instead, when asked, they immediately recall scents associated with childhood, home, loved ones, fear, or loss. The problem, he says, is that people are rarely given the language and confidence to talk about scents.
In his new book, Sniff: A History of Smells, due out September 8, Tullett debunks another common cliché: the idea that the past “smelled better.” According to him, the past didn’t smell any more or less than the present; it just had different scents.
And here the issue becomes more political. Scents, he says, have often been used to mark differences and discriminate. Tenants rejected because of prejudices about the scents of their food, the homeless stigmatized for “excessive odor,” entire communities judged by the noses of others.
Therefore, according to Tullett, we need to be more aware of how we judge scents and more empathetic to the preferences of others. Because a well-thought-out sense of smell doesn't necessarily divide us; it can help us better understand ourselves and the people around us.
In the end, every era leaves its own scent. For 21st-century Britain, Tullett mentions hand sanitizer, wildfires and water pollution. Even the nostalgic smell of a log fire, he warns, can change meaning: from a warm memory of home, to a sign of fear for a world that burns more often.
