He is joined by Sara Risch, a researcher with the Chicago-based company Science By Design. By Blaine P. Friedlander Jr. Distinguishing the difference between the aroma of pepperoni pizza and boiling cabbage is not as simple as it seems for everyone.
Some people have a heightened sense of smell and can be overwhelmed by aromas.
Cornell food chemists are finding out by standardizing the spectrum of smell. Your ability to smell that jasmine is based on a small combination of olfactory receptor proteins. But even for finite aromas like jasmine, people smell it in different ways. Simply, specific anosmia is a smell blindness or insensitivity to the odor of a chemical or group of chemicals in people with otherwise normal olfactory sensitivity. Specific anosmia poses a challenge to researchers because it can distort data in sensory research labs.