Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the Worlds Smells by Harold McGee

Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the Worlds Smells Reviews

• 
  ALX

  It frustrated me that I couldn’t describe a smell beyond simple words that didn’t give a fuller meaning to the scent. Before reading this book, “sweet” or “stale“ was about as descriptive as I could get. The aim of Nose Dive is to help you “acquire a new nose” or develop the relevant part of the brain to notice the odors around you so you can have a fuller experience of the world. That’s a dramatic claim, but while reading I felt I was already starting to train my nose (and mind) to discriminate between odors and understand what makes something smell the way it does. This book is truly a dive into the science and experience of scents. You can dive deep into the chemistry of volatiles or stay shallow and browse the many “smell tables” where items (food, flowers, parts of the body, and many more) are listed with their component smells and the molecules responsible. The author set out to discover why some food smells “suggest or echo or rhyme with very different things”. The answers are fascinating and varied but the book isn’t only concerned with food. More than half is devoted to smells found in nature that may rarely be experienced first-hand, but contribute to how we perceive and describe other more common scents. I learned so much about how, why and which molecules produce smell and how to begin picking apart the layers of scent in everyday life. I learned why old books smell good! I thought it was because I love books and libraries but no, it’s the molecule guaiacol (smells smoky), vanillin (vanilla) and benzaldehyde (almond essence), all from the wood pulp lignin.
• 
  Doug

  Being a fan of McGee's On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen I had to read this book. It didn't disappoint. It was a difficult read in that there is so much technical information in the form of chemical names and structures that my reading proceeded slowly. McGee makes it clear in the beginning of the book that there are many approaches to the book. I chose to mostly ignore the chemical names. Some of them, though repetition, become familiar but "ignoring" them didn't affect my enjoyment of the book. McGee's writing is very engaging and inspired me to become more of an intentional sniffer and to get into the habit of "listening to smells."
  
  One surprise for me was how evocative it was. As I read his discussion of various scents I found myself remembering and "smelling" odors/fragrances from my past at various ages and in many different settings. I guess that is not surprising in that olfactory neurons are closely associated with memory.
• 
  Payel Kundu

  This book is about Harold McGee (author of On Food and Cooking) going on a ten year journey through the world of smells. It was instigated by the first time he had aged grouse and found the smells at first virulently repellent, but later pleasant, and extremely interesting. The result is a journey through perhaps our most under-talked-about sense. I read the book as part of a neuroscience book club I co-run, and thus I read it cover to cover (not the index at the end). This was fine, but this cinder block sized book is perhaps better utilized as a reference book. It definitely has narrative elements, but I got a bit burned out on the chemistry reading the whole thing in a month.
  I really enjoyed McGee's imaginative approach. He begins by discussing the smells in interstellar space and says most would smell unpleasant and chemical-y to us. But once you start adding oxygen, you get the molecules we associate with life. I like the way he groups the smells, and draws parallels between how smells evolved in really dissimilar organisms but under related circumstances. For example, terpenoids. Volatile terpenoids may have been initially developed for signaling by early land insects, then adopted as insect-confusing defenses by early land plants. It’s shared terpenoids that make ginger and lemongrass resemble Amazonian ants. This pattern of land insects using a molecule for signaling, only for it to be synthesized by plants to confuse and manipulate them is a common pattern we see over and over again in the book. I found that fascinating.
  Similarly fascinating, but much more speculative, is McGee's idea that for early humans, perhaps encountering whiffs of themselves in certain strange new foods made those initially odd materials more approachable to eat. For example, cheese is a solid concentrate of proteins and fats, the same major ingredients of our body, and the surface of freshly made cheese is readily colonized by some of the same protein- and fat-eating bacteria that live on our skin. In modern day, McGee says we all find the weird smells of our bodies delightful, even if we don’t admit it. So foods that have some of those same smells allow us to have those delight experiences, but at a remove, and at times of our choosing, thus skirting the social embarrassment. If nothing else, it was comforting to learn that McGee also weirdly enjoys the smell of his own armpits when he's alone.
  I also found the attentional capture idea he presented quite interesting. Sometimes an unpleasant element in a complex odor mixture promotes “attentional capture”—gets the brain to commit more resources to processing the sensation—and this strengthens and prolongs the overall sensation. Indole is an example, it usually signals animals and decay, both potential threats, but is found in smells we typically find pleasant. In an experiment in which a mixture widely regarded was pleasant had a little indole added to it, participants found that mixture more pleasant than it was without the indole.
  Overall, really interesting exploration of a topic I wish more people wrote and thought about. It had me smelling my environment with more gusto, and with a more open mind than usual. It made me notice a lot of "out of place" smells as elements of familiar smells. It made me draw parallels across much broader categories than usual, and thus I felt I was smelling a bit more objectively, without as much expectation. It also made me really want to try a traditionally prepared grouse.
• 
  Fred Cheyunski

  A Deep Plunge into Odors and Their Chemistry - Hearing the author interviewed on NPR when book came out, I was intrigued as it seems not many popular books have been devoted to our “grand olfactory.” At least, since I could not remember another such book, I secured a copy to read. As I proceeded, I found that the text is indeed, as its main title suggests, a deep plunge into odors and their chemistry, yet written in a compelling and interesting manner.
  
  Sub-titled “a field guide,” the book is a tome of 688 pages divided into a preface and introduction, then 5 parts of 19 chapters and a conclusion. Namely, there is the Preface: My First Grouse, the Introduction: A Sense of the Essential, Part 1, Simplest Smells: (1) Among the Stars (2) Planet Earth, Early Life, Stinking Sulfur, (3) Starter Set; Part 2, Animals – Dependence, Mobility, Microbiomes: (4) Animal Bodies, (5) Animal Signals, (6) The Human Animal; Part 3, Land Plants – Independence Immobility, Virtuosity: (7) Sweet Smells of Success, (8) Plant Volatile Families: Green, Fruity, Flowery, Spicy, (9) Mosses, Trees, Grasses, Weeds, (10) Flowers, (11) Edible Greens and Herbs, (12) Edible Roots and Seeds: Staples and Spices, (13) Fruits; Part 4, Land, Waters, After-Life: (14) The Land: Soil, Fungi, Stone, (15) The Waters: Plankton, Seaweeds, Shellfish, Fish, (16) After-Life: Smoke, Asphalt, Industry; Part 5, Chosen Smells: (17) Fragrances, (18) Cooked Foods, (19) Cured and Fermented Foods; and Conclusion: My Second Grouse.
  
  My favorite aspects of the book come in the Introduction as McGee gives the rationale for his 10-year exploration, an explanation of smell and an overview of the book, which then becomes quite involved. For instance, at the start (Location 71-73), the author states “This book is about smells, and about making the most of our access to them . . . a guide to the wide world of smells, nice and not, and the airborne molecular specks that stimulate them.” He goes on (in Location 157 -63) to elucidate that “Smell is such a powerful and revealing sense because it detects actual little pieces of things in the world” ---the volatile molecules given off---hence the attention to volatile chemistry. Indicating that smell is more versatile than taste, the author explains that odors are made up of composites of these “volatiles” likening them to musical chords. He continues a little later (Location 289-98) to detail that “. . . receptors register their target molecules . . . send electrical pulses .to particular receiving areas in the brain. . . the brain processes the many streams of signals and integrates them into a sensation . . . [and] coordinates all of our biological functions to help us survive in a complex, ever-changing world.” McGee proceeds historically and topically from the Big Bang, planetary and life formation as well as societal development to explicate the simplest to most complex volatile molecules and associated odors. He uses helpful charts to summarize particular items of interest such as specific flowers, associated smells, and the molecules from which they are constituted.
  
  As he progresses, McGee brings to mind other books such as those about other senses such as Levitin’s “This is Your Brain on Music” and Hockney’s “History of Pictures.” He also had me recalling physical science narratives such as in Green’s “Until the End of Time” or Bauer’s “Western Science” as well as psychology/neurology texts like Feldman Barrett’s “How Emotions Are Made.”
  
  While among the book’s strengths is the amount of detail, this trait is also one its drawback as well. At times, I felt it was going on and on. Then it occurred to me, the book would best be used as a reference that can be consulted as one has questions or comes into contact with different smells. While I did like the charts provided, they are difficult to read in Kindle edition, so if using as a resource, one might want a printed version.
  
  Even with that said, “sniff out” this book and consider the aromatic dimension more fully.
• 
  Dave Reads

  Being a fan of Harold McGee's previous book, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, I had to read his latest. It didn't disappoint. It was a somewhat difficult read because there is so much technical information in the form of chemical names and structures that my reading proceeded slowly. McGee makes it clear in the beginning of the book that there are many approaches to the book. I chose to mostly ignore the chemical names. McGee's writing is very engaging and inspired me to become more of an intentional sniffer and get into the habit of "listening to smells. Some people will view this book as more of a textbook than a casual read.
  
  The first of the five sections of the book describes primordial smells, followed by animal, plant, land, and water smells, followed by the smells of food and fragrances.
  
  My takeaways included:
  
  Humans have a strong sense of smell. A 2014 study estimated that the human nose "could distinguish, in theory, up to a trillion different odors. The only problem is, it's very hard to describe most scents. We can classify shapes and colors precisely and have hundreds of sound words to differentiate booms and bangs from buzzes and beeps. With smells, however, most of us are left groping. We just don't have a vocabulary for odors beyond vague descriptors like "wet dog" or "chemically."
  
  We have 400 odor receptors that work with each other to distinguish smells.
  
  McGee writes that we mentally categorize smells based on where we first encounter them. And it turns out that "smell is the most important sense when it comes to distinguishing among different foods. Taste and smell together make the flavor. But taste only really tells us about fundamental sensations. It's the sense of smell that gives us all the variety."
  
  The molecules we smell today got their start as the universe' cooked.' We have receptors for specific smells, like eggy, sulfurous hydrogen sulfide, and ammonia. There are other things we don't smell, like methane.
  McGee writes, "plants and animals smell different, and plants smell better, particularly after death." He describes the process of death and resulting smells this way: "When an animal dies, its unmanaged enzymes begin to break down its tissues, microbes gain entry and feed and generate metabolic wastes, fees, and beetles attracted by all these volatiles lay eggs that hatch into hungry maggots the produce their waste, and eventually solid flesh liquefies." Plus, we learn that animal excrement is very different in smell. Horse excrement is less offensive than beef and dairy cattle because of the types of food they eat.
  
  The earliest physicians found that the way people smelled often indicated medical conditions. Foul breath may indicate a damaged liver. A honey-like smell of the urine could indicate diabetes.
  
  Why does poop smell? "Excrement is malodorous because the colon is airlines, and the gut microbiome is anaerobic. As microbes break down, they produce a smell when they leave the body.
  
  Benjamin Franklin proposed studying why farts smell. He knew that the smell was affected by what we eat but hoped to find the diet to elevate the problem.
  
  The smell of our breath is caused by the bacterial breakdown of microbes of the food we eat. But even if we haven't eaten in the morning, we wake with 'bad breath' because there hasn't been enough saliva to wash away the bacteria.
  
  Our feet have a quarter of a million sweat glands that release moisture, minerals, and glucose sugar. When the chemicals are not broken down, we develop a sweaty-foot cheesy smell.
  
  I feel bad for not raving about this book. McGee has done his research, but I sometimes thought he wanted to write an organic chemistry book instead of something for non-scientists. His examples were fascinating, but I got lost in some of the chemistry.
• 
  Keenan

  There’s a deep irony in publishing a book about the what and why and how of smell in the middle of a global pandemic where everyone with two brain cells is wearing a mask outdoors. I’m all for it.
  
  Going into this book blind made for an interesting adventure (sorry to everyone reading this review). I did not expect one of the first chapters to be the smells of the universe after the Big Bang, or for a verbose section on cat piss, or for chapter-by-chapter lessons in the intricacies of organic chemistry. Lest this seem like a simple textbook (the number of tables within is suggestive), we’re treated throughout with historical anecdotes, personal stories, and invitations to deeper cultural understanding through the volatiles that shape our world. To put it another way, it’s rare to find a book that’ll quote Paradise Lost on one page:
  

  [The archangel Raphael] now is come
  Into the blissful field, through Groves of Myrrh,
  And flowering Odours, Cassia, Nard, and Balm;
  A Wilderness of sweets; for Nature here
  Wantoned as in her prime, and played at will
  Her Virgin Fancies, pouring forth more sweet,
  Wild above Rule or Art; enormous bliss.
  Him, through the spicy Forest onward come,
  Adam discerned, as in the door he sat
  Of his cool Bower.

  and a diagram of the metabolic processes and associated smells of land plants on another:
  
  Aside from answering questions one may never have considered (why do rocks smell, why does goat smell more gamey, etc.), two points are highlighted over and over much to the delight of the reader. The first (and the reason for the Big Bang chapter) is that the progression of smells can be understood in a much longer temporal frame than the average human lifetime: yeasts and insects have existed far longer than flowers, the latter likely learning to imitate smells from the former to entice or repel other lifeforms; metal has a smell thanks to it helping oxygen oxidise blood in our nostrils, hence the ‘bloody’ smell — one must then wonder that to early humans our impression of the smell of metal would be that of blood and not the other way around. The second is that our senses were designed to be stimulated, and taste and smell are the machinery we have that bring us most in touch with the world on a molecular level. The same neurons that have assembled to let us do backflips and invent computers also have the ability to differentiate minute differences between thousands of molecules, allowing us a complex and multidimensional window from which to perceive the "osmocosm", the universe of scents, odors, and smells.
• 
  Maggie

  This book is fascinating, and both highly readable and completely unreadable. I finally abandoned it. Because, while it's dense and magical and weird and erudite and broad, it's also kind of tedious.
  
  But there are gems like this: "Ambergris is the strangest of all fragrance materials, a startling demonstration of Hero Carbon's protean permutability. It begins as a stinking obstruction in the rectum of ocean-cruising sperm whales, and ends years later as sublime seashore jetsam, the finest emitting a smell like no other, with facets of the ocean and soil, exotic woods, incense, and tobacco."
  
  And here's what petrichor is: "So the smell of freshly wetted stone turns out not to come from the stone’s own minerals. Petrichor, or gaiachor, is the veneer of volatiles that had been emitted by microbes, fungi, plants, animals, humans and our technologies, then modified in the atmosphere by sunlight, oxygen, nitrogen, and one another and accumulated on mineral surfaces. These volatiles are usually too sparse and omnipresent for us to notice them in the air around us. But when rain suddenly drives them in greater amounts from mineral surfaces into the air, the volatiles become perceptible."
• 
  Stephen

  Harold McGee is a geek and a nerd, in the very best sense of both of those more-often pejorative terms. Years ago, McGee wrote the definitive, best, most-useful and widely-hauled book on the chemistry of cooking: "On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen." It went into two editions: 1984 and 2004. I have both of them. McGee is one of those rare science writers who can say scientific things in ways that non-scientists can understand and enjoy. And he has done it again in his latest effort: "Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World's Smells." He became fascinated with how odor works which fascination carried him through a decade of research. He explains how the sense of smell works, how the giving off of odors works, and moves easily between molecular chemistry and why bees like flowers. It was necessary for me to read this book slowly and in small bites in order to properly digest his offerings. "Nose Dive" is not likely to appeal to every reader but, for those attracted to the notion, it is likely the best book in the world on the subject.
  
  
  
• 
  Alicia

  McGee explains that the book can be read several different ways and I can appreciate that he knows that this isn't a book that's a quick and easy read about smells- it's an in-depth investigative explanation about smells from around the world and what their building blocks are (and how similar they are to other smells that you might not think) based on their makeup and how they're disbursed into the volatiles that we smell.
  
  He literally starts with the creation of the world, the big bang, and the volatiles in the air like we smell the volcanoes and the air and the stars, which was fascinating. He went all there including cat pee and semen and vanilla and fish. All around the world and all around the kitchen.
  
  It was cool and his charts broke up the text but he used easy transitions, chapters, and headings and subheadings that could be useful if you were using sections (like on beer and wine) but wanted to skip the smells from the sea.
• 
  DK Simoneau

  Hmmm. I don’t know how I feel. This was interesting, especially in light of so many people losing their sense of smell because of Covid-19. It was encyclopedic. Fascinating yet boring. The author suggests skipping around which I ended up appreciating. I think for me what was missing was the how. How does one develop this increase pallet of scent recognition. How does one train themselves to recognize more and more in the world of scent. I guess it just wasn’t what I thought it was going to be.
• 
  Mark A. Vierthaler

  Harold McGee creates a fascinating, well-researched, and beautifully written book about the chemistry behind the smells of the world.
  
  It's a testament to McGee's talent as a writer - and passion for the subject - that something as seemingly dry as molecular chemistry could be written about so eloquently. While it can definitely be dense at times, for those with a deeper knowledge of the science of scents, it's required reading.
• 
  Cameron Mcconnell

  Fascinating account of the chemicals wafting from various substances in our environment. Full of information this reads a bit like a very interesting text book. I wish my chemistry classes were not 40 years ago. It did give me a new way of thinking about the odors wafting about and what they may represent. Will keep this for reread of various passages.
• 
  Lisa Konet

  Absolutely fascinating and well researched and I love how this was presented. Easily one of my favorite non-fiction human body books I have read all year. So glad my library had this and I may buy the hard copy. It was that good.
  
  Very much recommended to those who want learn more about the human body and my favorite sense: smell.
• 
  Clare Fauke

  I wish there was a category for "too long didn't read" cause this would be at the top. I get it -- dude knows a lot of astrophysics and earthbound physics and chemistry, but lord, please get to the point.
• 
  Lauren W

  Wow, this has to be one of the nerdiest books I have ever read. Obviously this book needs a sample pack of smells to go along with it. I have an enormous, and much more nuanced, appreciation for smells!
• 
  Adrienne

  It was a bit more of a dive into chemistry than I was ready for. To be fair, I didn’t get even close to finishing it, but that’s because I had to return it to the library. Perhaps, one day, I’ll give it another sniff :)
• 
  Jennifer

  4.7, sometimes you need a book to fill you with some wonderment about the world.