place/local/ingredients/sensory

The link, for all those who curious about tastes from the past, including Ron Pattinson*.

“Olfaction helps shape our cultures, although it often does so unknowingly or without us noticing,” says (Inger) Leemans, who led the Odeuropa project. “When we talk about cultural heritage, we can think about religious rituals, but we can also think about specific scents that we’ve been cherishing and living with for a long time.”

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* Something he told be for Brewing Local: “Why do I want to taste extinct styles? On one level it’s purely from curiosity: how did it taste, what did it look like, how did it drink? All the things you can only really learn about a beer by having one in a glass in front of you. That simple need to know could be satisfied by a pint or two.

“But then there’s the cultural aspect. Beer styles—and especially those associated with a specific place—have a wider significance than just being a drink. Because every beer style is a unique cultural item. When one disappears, the culture it came from is diminished.”

The link this week begins with sensory, but more after the paragraph.

The paragraph:

“In attempting to bridge the gap between digital and physical realms, Clarke et al.’s tech-besotted crew have stripped smell memory of the personal, the unique, and the magical. They offer up instead a software-driven algorithm housed in a Plexiglas box full of electronics and bug juice. They want to humanize technology but the more likely outcome is that they trivialize human experience.”

Reason A this matters: Avery Gilbert wrote “The Nose Knows” and more recently has been at the forefront of research related to cannabis aroma perception. And he’s right, smell memory is magical. Reason B: trivializing human experience essentially takes a hammer to the social aspect of beer.