For years, best-selling children's author Stacy Gregg had no sense of taste or smell as a result of Covid. That was weird enough but when those senses finally returned, things got weirder.
Covid is back! Not in a fun way obviously. The exclamation mark I've put there is misleading somehow – it makes for a cheerful announcement – like saying 'Florals are back!', or 'Animal prints are slinking their way into your wardrobe again!'. The return of Covid, however, is more like another unwanted season of Married at First Sight. Covid is back for yet another season (13), don't miss a moment of the drama!
Covid cases are indeed on a sharp incline again and although we are all bored shitless by the virus at this point, health experts are telling us that we should keep our guard up. This is because rather than building an immunity to Covid each time we get it, the virus consistently erodes our wellbeing every time we are exposed (again, clear parallels to MAFS).
For some of us though, Covid has never truly left. Long Covid takes many grim forms and I consider myself lucky that my version of Long Covid is one of the more playful side effects. For three years now the virus has robbed me of my sense of taste and smell.
At one point, about two years in, I fancied I was getting my senses back again and then wham! While on a trip to London I got Covid so bad I was hospitalised. After that, Covid really doubled down and my senses of taste and smell disappeared entirely. Disappointingly, this didn't curb my appetite. Initially I hoped this loss might act like some cheap DIY Ozempic. But nope. I was still hungry as per. I still ate. It's just that meals tasted like nothing much. It wasn't unbearable – I mean I'd still get that satisfying mouth-feel that came with the fats and the oils, and I could still taste salty and sweet and sourness. But the actual coding, the DNA descriptors inherent in the infinite varieties of food on the plate were completely absent.
A couple of strange things happen when you can't taste food. The first is that your brain leaps in all fawning and apologetic and compensates for the loss of taste and smell by informing your mouth what a food should taste like. So, for example, if you are eating a piece of salmon, even though you can't really taste it, your brain will sort through your memory banks and say "this thing looks like a bit of salmon ergo it will taste like salmon" and so you get some kind of ersatz fish memory, although very much more mild than the real taste would be.
The second thing is that you realise your sense of smell and taste isn't just useful for sharing outrageously expensive small tasting plates and blithering about the notes of citrus and nduja in the crudo. Primarily, your taste and smell is an OSH requirement. It was installed by evolution for your health and safety so that you can smell a fire and run before it burns you alive or sniff out pus on a leg wound or take a bite of meat and realise that the carcass that your clan is feeding on has finally turned.
Because of some kind of Long Covid brain scramble I found that my first-responder senses were not just MIA but actively working against me. Phantom smells, usually gross ones, would come at me out of nowhere and refuse to leave. I would suddenly panic and ask my partner if the house was on fire, insistent that I could smell smoke. In the old folk’s home, visiting my dad, I was utterly overpowered by the smell of poo (not his, another resident) that penetrated my brain and had to run outside and couldn't stop retching for the rest of the day.
So, yeah, I had effectively un-evolved and it was sub-par. As Joni Mitchell pointed out, you don't know what you've got til it's gone.
"It must be awful," friends would say when I told them, "I mean, god, I love food." And yeah, obviously I loved food too. At least I thought I did. Until I returned to my senses.
It was two weeks ago in a cafe in Grey Lynn that it happened. I ordered a plate of mixed salad, sat down and was stunned. I could actually taste the food! Out of nowhere, seemingly, my sense of taste had returned. I could taste everything on my plate and it was… revolting.
Having had three whole years off, the rush of it all was way too much. I was like a toddler, new to everything on my plate. Seriously those kids have a point when they refuse to 'open up for the brum-brum aeroplane' because when you're coming in at ground zero with taste tolerance you realise that nearly everything we're eating is horrible. It's all too loud and too strong. In that Grey Lynn salad medley alone there were a million flavours on one plate. Coriander, mint, dukkha, basil and curry all at once? Way too much information! As for having my sense of smell back? Every sodding day feels like stepping into an elevator in the '80s with a woman wearing Opium.
Perhaps, like a toddler, I'll adjust eventually. But last weekend I absentmindedly grazed a platter and bit into a bit of blue cheese and it was every bit as gross as the first time I tried it when I was twelve so I wouldn't bet on it. I feel more like this is maybe me now, in my larvae state, recalibrating to a world that has become unnecessarily complicated and garish.
Truthfully, step back and assess it people. We are all putting way too many flavours into every dish we make. Everything is too fussed with, too busy, too imposing. The wines, as Sebastian Flyte said in Brideshead Revisited, are too various. And the smells you are wearing are a dumpster fire.
Hand on heart, I liked it better when I couldn't register a thing. Not looking to be hospitalised again, but if Covid comes for me this time around, I hope it's taking requests.
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