Yale University Press
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FOR countless people worldwide, their first inkling that they had covid-19 didn’t come from a test, but from something far more visceral: anosmia, the loss of the ability to smell.
Our sense of smell, and our understanding of it, helps us to navigate the world, protecting us from harm and adding to the joy of living in equal measures. Catching a whiff of mercaptan, the eggy-smelling chemical added to natural gas supplies, can save you from a dangerous gas leak. And smelling the roses in an immaculate garden can lighten your mood enormously.
Yet putting into words what you can smell can be tricky for all sorts of reasons, not least because it is so subjective. But Elise Vernon Pearlstine, a wildlife biologist who changed careers to become a natural perfumer, manages it with aplomb. “Although we did not cause the rose to breathe out scent or the frankincense tree to shed fragrant tears, our stories are intertwined and mediated through the plant’s secondary compounds that we call fragrance,” she writes.
In Scent, Pearlstine’s style suits the subject matter, relating the intricate, delicate details of each fragrance and the source of its smell. It is another investigation into scent, following Paola Totaro and Robert Wainwright’s book On the Scent published earlier this year. But while their book concentrated on smell and its dysfunctions, Pearlstine’s is more of a journey of discovery.
From outlining how frankincense functions as a protective resin that stops pathogens from invading wounded trees, to explaining how a tobacco plant’s sweet-smelling benzylacetone lures in pollinators to ensure its survival, Pearlstine effortlessly unpacks a lifetime of knowledge. Meticulous information is shared through evocative writing to give you a passenger seat on a tour around the world’s flora and fauna.
Along the way, we learn some unusual truths. Midges, the bane of summer life with their persistent bites, are vital to our supply of chocolate, acting as the main pollinator for cacao trees. Ghanaian cacao farmers have managed to supercharge their crop by planting banana and plantain trees nearby, both of which lure in more midges to fertilise the cacao flowers with the required 35 pollen grains.
The pollination of the cacao plant by midges turns from an interesting dinner party anecdote into macroeconomics, as Pearlstine explains that between 4 million and 10 million people worldwide are supported by the plant.
We also learn how big business has harnessed nature’s powers. Less than 5 per cent of the vanilla flavour in our ice creams, cakes and cookies comes from the brown, wrinkled pods of the vanilla plant, with their jet-black beans. The rest is synthetic vanillin, produced using yeast or by blending chemicals. Vanilla was one of the first scents to be synthesised, says Pearlstine, as a by-product of wood pulp or rice.
And of course, as a perfumer, Pearlstine devotes later chapters to how we can capture, bottle and blend the best of nature’s scents to make new, layered fragrances.
In rare moments, the torrent of information can wash over you too quickly, with dense paragraphs chock-full of facts and scientific terminology that muddles, rather than clarifies. When information overload combines with sometimes overwrought writing, it can take a second read to follow.
But those are the exceptions in this eminently readable book, which will leave you lingering a little longer among the roses – and the other smells that make our world what it is.
Chris Stokel-Walker is a technology writer based in Newcastle, UK
