[kevinmchugh]

Harold McGee, author of the seminal On Food and Cooking, has a new book called Nosedive, entirely about the world of smell. It's eye-opening. Highly recommend it.

As the article says, you can train your sense of smell. Just reading Nosedive has been enough to retrain how I think about certain smells. Recently someone was complaining about how bad some old shoes smelled, and all I could think was that they smelled like cheese rind, which is much less unpleasant.

Edit:

> others cannot detect the sulfur compounds responsible for the unpleasant odor of “asparagus pee.”

Not everyone produces that smell after eating asparagus either, which complicates things