Did that include tongue-based tastes, too, like sweet / salty / sour / bitter / umami, or just olfactory ones? Like, if you ate an orange would it be sweet and sour at all?
I had experienced loss both of smell (completely, kitty litter smelled like nothing) and taste (not completely). You still sense if something's salty, for example, but it's very remote. As an anecdote, the aubergine paste, which is usually off-putting and bitter to my taste (but smells nice) started tasting like nothing, really, so I happily ate my wife's supply. Soy sauce also seemed far less salty than usual. Taste remains, but very far, and smell is just lost. Very bizarre experience, would not recommend.
For me yes. Couldn’t taste anything for about a week so I just ate soup and toast. After that the sweet , salt ,fatty etc came back so I swapped to lasagna and cannelloni as it was the most normal tasting food.
Couldn’t even smell the alcohol in a bottle of whiskey.
Very weird how much smell/taste means to us but how do you don’t notice it going.
In our house no one noticed their sense of smell going yet it was a massive impact to me when I was eating flavourless food for two weeks. It was incredibly depressing not being able to go outside and being stuck in eating gruel.
The only reason we got tested was because someone wanted a sick note from the doctor and she asking everyone what they’re sense of smell was like.
Just to be pedantic: You can never smell the alcohol (ethanol) in any alcoholic drink. It's a tasteless and odourless chemical. What you taste or smell are the congeners, which are other organic molecules that are the byproducts of fermentation. In the case of whisky, you also have the additional flavour and odour chemicals leached from wood barrels.
You're basically smelling "charred wood extract" when smelling Whiskey.
You're almost certainly smelling the denaturing agent in the alcohol, the vast majority of commercial sources add something to it, even for "technical" grades.
I kept a bottle of Caol Ila by my desk and sniffed it every few hours so I could detect when my smell start coming back. I accidentally did it on a few work calls...
It's too late to edit the above comment to clarify it, but could the downvoters please explain why I was downvoted? I'm genuinely curious: what does "loss of taste" mean here? I'd like to know in case I encounter it.
For instance, if I have sinus congestion so that I can't breathe through my nose, I can't experience the olfactory component of tastes. If you gave me orange juice and lemon juice, I'd be able to tell that both were sweet and sour but might not be able to distinguish between the flavors.
So when I've read about losing taste, I've wondered if this was like all the prior times when I've lost the sense of smell, or if this was something new and my taste buds would also stop working so that I couldn't experience "salty" anymore.
When people discuss taste, it's not always clear whether they mean the sensation you experience in your tongue or in your nose.
Good question, I'm also interested. In my case (more covid-like symptoms than anything else, but no confirmation) I can feel difference between lemon and banana. But the sourness doesn't bother me at all. Also onion doesn't work anymore, normally I would cry like crazy, now I can keep it under my nose and feel only a little bit of pain inside the nose.