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    Season to Taste: How I Lost My Sense of Smell and Found My Way
    Unavailable
    Season to Taste: How I Lost My Sense of Smell and Found My Way
    Unavailable
    Season to Taste: How I Lost My Sense of Smell and Found My Way
    Ebook311 pages4 hours

    Season to Taste: How I Lost My Sense of Smell and Found My Way

    By Molly Birnbaum

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    “A rich, engrossing, and deeply intelligent story….This is a book I won’t soon forget.”
    —Molly Wizenberg, bestselling author of A Homemade Life

    “Fresh, smart, and consistently surprising. If this beautifully written book were a smell, it would be a crisp green apple.”
    —Claire Dederer, bestselling author of Poser

    Season to Taste is an aspiring chef’s moving account of finding her way—in the kitchen and beyond—after a tragic accident destroys her sense of smell. Molly Birnbaum’s remarkable story—written with the good cheer and great charm of popular food writers Laurie Colwin and Ruth Reichl—is destined to stand alongside Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia as a classic tale of a cooking life. Season to Taste is sad, funny, joyous, and inspiring.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJun 21, 2011
    ISBN9780062081506
    Unavailable
    Season to Taste: How I Lost My Sense of Smell and Found My Way

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    Reviews for Season to Taste

    4/5

    45 ratings9 reviews

    What did you think?

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    • 4/5
      I found this book totally fascinating, not least because Birnbaum consulted with a number of scientists at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, where I began working this summer. Really interesting to read the lay perspective of the science behind taste and smell, which is the raison d'etre of Monell. Evocative writing - highly recommended.
    • 3/5
      I was recommended this book by a friend foodie who knew I had lost my sense of smell. It was useful to learn a bit more about how smell works and can be lost and regained, though it seems it is too late to recover mine now 20 or so years later. It was useful to learn about shared fears of dangers not detected and phantom smells. For me the most interesting part was she regained her smell but found it difficult to relearn the names and to identify smells, showing there are multiple parts to the sense of smell.

      But also interesting was her relation of her ordinary life with or without smells, eg the loss of smell making it harder to recognise a partner or a baby, and other circumstances which I had hardly thought about.

      It's an easy read, a bit repetitive in parts, but the science is easy and the visits to scientists, psychologists and labs interesting. She explains that she (and others) have relearn to cook, concentrating on texture and colour as well as smell. And she concludes that it is not necessary to complicate tastes and smells to make good food, which is a conclusion I would definitely agree with.
    • 3/5
      The problem with memoirs is that it's very difficult to write one without coming across as totally self-absorbed. At least it seems to be. So--although this was an interesting story, I got very frustrated with the author for the first half of the book because she seemed whiny and spoiled and difficult and--as it happens--totally self-absorbed. In the second half of the book, on the other hand, she broadens her focus a bit and talks to people like Oliver Sacks and Elaine Grosinger. At which point, I got a little bored and felt that she was straying far afield of her own story and padding the book a little bit. I am, in fact, impossible to please.
    • 4/5
      Combining foodie memoir and accessible science writing, it was pretty much guaranteed that I'd love this book. Molly Birnbaum dreams of going to culinary school and becoming a chef. But, a traffic accident wrecks her knee, breaks her pelvis, and completely destroys her sense of smell. Taking her sense of taste along with it, and plunging her into a deep (and totally understandable) depression.

      Her story combines learning to adjust to her new normal, some very fine food writing (though tragic, at times, in context), interesting science about a very little understood sense.

      Also noting- this is the first book I read start to finish on a Kindle. It was an engrossing read (foodie memoir! with science!) so I was using a new book I was almost sure I'd like, as a test case for working with the e-Reader format.
      The verdict: reading on an e-reader is an entirely decent way to gobble down a book. I never pictured myself saying that. Reading on a Kindle is DEFINITELY not reading a proper, paper book. There's a sense of it being not-quite-a-book while also Not A Computer. But it's a perfectly workable format.
    • 5/5
      In her frank and often moving debut, Molly Birnbaum's autobiographical account tells of her aspirations to be a chef, and how these dreams were shattered when she was hit by a car and sustained serious injuries that not only resulted in a lengthy hospital stay but also the loss of her ability to smell. Not encouraged by her doctors to hope for its return, she met with a wide variety of experts in the field in her drive to understand the science of smell and thereby her condition; this is her story.A mixture of first-person account interspersed with a critical discussion of scientific papers and books that also takes in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past on its way, and meetings with experts that comprise physicians working in smell and taste clinics all over the United States, olfactory scientists, psychologists, neurologist Oliver Sacks, chemists who create perfumes and others who develop flavours for the food industry, right down to former poet laureate of the United States Robert Pinsky. The autobiographical part is unflinching in its honesty, painting a very vivid picture of someone for whom smell has always played an important role in her life, and who is left completely bereft by an all-encompassing absence in the aftermath of the accident; the sections devoted to science are very well researched and written clearly and easily understandable and are utterly fascinating. What emerges is essentially a book dedicated to the miracle that is the sensory perception of smell, and, as the experts readily admit, mostly still a mystery. Linked to a person's memory as well as their emotions and moods, smell constitutes a large part of an individual's identity. Very articulate and filled with descriptions that make the mouth water and evoke the scents they describe, with prose that just rolls off the tongue, this book is a story of indomitable human spirit and an amazing account of the brain's complexity, although I would have welcomed a bibliography and a list of recommended suggestions for further reading in an appendix.Entirely life-affirming and inspiring, this book will make you see your nose in a whole new light; miss at your own peril.(This review was originally written as part of Amazon's Vine programme.)
    • 2/5
      Season to Taste is a semi-interesting memoir about one young woman's journey to come to terms with the impairment of her sense of smell. The book is at its best when describing food with luscious adjectives, but too often it gets bogged down with the author's inability to structure her thoughts. Season to Taste constantly jumps back and forth between Molly Birnbaum's everyday struggles with regaining her sense of smell and the science behind how the brain processes scent. I found the author to be slightly annoying, mainly for her inability to stay on topic. I never got over this annoyance because she really never gave the reader time to know her. Instead, any time the reader gets close, she begins spouting off more facts and figures. Interviews popped up at random times, jarring the reader out of the narrative. Overall, the book was just oddly paced and structured. I would have liked it much better if she had separated her personal life into different chapters from her interviews and research. The timeline is all over the place and indiscerible since everything is just meshed together. I wished she had spent more time recounting the stories of others who had lost their ability to smell. I found their stories to have much more flavor and emotional impact than her own. I would only recommend this book to people who either have a condition similar to her own or are interested in the science of scent. Molly Birnbaum did bring attention to the much overlooked issue of loss of smell, and for that, she should be applauded. I only wish her book would have been written a bit better so it could have packed a harder punch.
    • 5/5
      Absolutely fascinating----I'm suddenly aware that I'm not using the power of smell nearly enough! Although Birnbaum seems to have an unusual ability, finally, to smell, it does make me realize that it's probably something I haven't paid nearly enough attention to in my life. The history of "everything about smelling" that she includes in the midst of her personal story is a historical world I knew nothing about. She writes beautifully----her writing is chock full of descriptions, just as one would expect.
    • 4/5
      Molly Birnbaum loses her sense of smell following an accident. As she was planning to become a chef, this is a catastrophe. As her sense of smell begins to return, Molly sets off to find as much as she can about our sense of smell and how it works.Part personal memoir, part exploration of the science behind smell, this book is both enlightening and enjoyable.
    • 4/5
      Season To Taste is Molly Birnbaum's memoir about losing her sense of smell in a traumatic car accident. At first look losing your sense of smell may not seem like a truly horrible loss, but more of your brain, memory, and taste are controlled by scents then you realize. At the time of the accident Molly was immersed in the restaurant world, getting ready to enter culinary school, and thrilled to have finally found her place. Without a sense of smell food became a bland, largely tasteless obstacle to happiness. Molly chronicles her journey back to taste and smell through exhaustive academic research and personal experimentation. She meets with famed neurological expert Oliver Sacks, visits a commercial flavor lab, learns more than you would think possible about the human sense of smell, and takes a perfume class. Through it all she never gives up hope that one day she will regain her elusive sense of smell.Molly Birnbaum comes across as an engaging and likeable young woman, the most important characteristic of a successful memoir. From the beginning I was rooting for her, hoping her life would return to normal and she would be able to pursue her dreams of becoming a chef. Season to Taste is a great foodie book with some sublime descriptions of the food Molly cooks or dreams of smelling and tasting. It is also an exhaustive exploration of the research that has been done to date on the human sense of smell. Sometimes the scientific side comes across dry and those parts can drag a bit. I did enjoy her descriptions of various smell disorders that have occurred and her experiences and discussions with the fellow sufferers she meets. It was astounding to me that people can be overwhelmed by phantom smells or can recover their sense of smell one, individual scent at a time. Season to Taste is a unique and interesting book that was worth reading.