Whipped cream should smell like cold milk fat with a little sweetness. Some Costco members opened a can and got something else: a chemical smell, and a taste to match.

A sinus infection and post-COVID recovery flipped a Serious Eats canned tomato taste test. Here’s what it shows about smell, taste, and how flavor is judged.

SMELL is the strongest clean RCT signal so far for persistent, chronic post-COVID loss. The open question is still whether the benefit comes from the odors themselves or from structured, attentive engagement with smell.

The bag of almonds has been in the pantry since last year’s holiday baking. They look fine, and nobody remembers the date. Do almonds even go bad, or is that just a bag of nuts that lasts forever?

In the video, Amy Calandruccio, a board-certified, licensed acupuncturist at Middlesex Health, explains how the work started. Early in the pandemic, the center began getting calls from people who had lost taste and smell, or who were dealing with brain fog and pain. They wanted to know if acupuncture could help. She tried it, and patients responded.

Fifty-three percent of the people we surveyed can smell reliably, all the time. That is the good news, and it is a smaller number than most people would guess about themselves and their neighbors. Everyone else sits somewhere along a gradient: 21.7% perceive scent frequently, 12.2% occasionally, 4.8% rarely. For 8.3%, there is nothing at all.

There is a contradiction at the heart of what we eat now. We have never had more access to the world's flavors—every spice, every technique, every fermentation protocol available on a shelf or a screen—and yet most of us, if we're being honest, still reach for the same things we reached for 10 years ago. The future of flavor is being built in kitchens and labs and cooperatives scattered across six continents, and most of it will reach you disguised as something familiar.

Two people can eat the exact same food and have dramatically different blood sugar responses.

The World Taste & Smell Association (WTSA), through its Space Sensory Lab, is pleased to announce a new collaboration with the Deep Space Food Consortium, fiscally sponsored by the Methuselah Foundation.

The latest science of taste and smell is dismantling old myths and revealing something stranger, messier, and far more human.

A new study in JAMA Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery (June 25, 2026) reports that adults with type 2 diabetes taking a GLP-1 receptor agonist were roughly 48% more likely to be diagnosed with a smell or taste disturbance than matched patients on a different diabetes drug. The headline number is real. So is the part most coverage buried: the absolute risk is tiny, the study can't prove cause, and a separate body of work says these same drugs sometimes sharpen the senses they're now accused of dulling. The interesting story is the contradiction, and what it tells us about where GLP-1 drugs actually act.

There is a molecule called 2-furanmethanethiol. You have almost certainly smelled it without knowing its name. It is one of the compounds that makes a fresh pot of coffee smell like a fresh pot of coffee, and a single drop of it would be detectable in a swimming pool of water. For most people, it registers as roasty, warm, faintly like popcorn. For someone with parosmia, that same molecule can smell like rot, sewage, or something burning. Same chemical, same nose, a completely different verdict.

Loss of taste and smell has been linked with depression, but historically it has largely been treated as an inconvenience

At a summit about the future of food, the hardest question wasn’t how to grow it. It was how to get my nephew to eat it.

WTSA’s Mindy Yang spent three days at the Menus of Change Leadership Summit at The Culinary Institute of America thinking about how we get people—especially kids—to actually want to eat these foods.