Throughout the globe, scents overflow people’s cultural lives. From the smell of vivid, pleasant flowers to the taste of scrumptious, stomach-filling food, scents provide us with various meanings and pleasures to life.
Each cultural lifestyle offers something new to the table, which means the senses involved in each country’s collective palate can be extremely diverse. There’s different tasting food, different sounding music, different smelling flowers, and more.
However, for people who don’t travel, their senses are rarely exposed to other counties’ food traditions.
To put it more simply, people are not often directly exposed to the full scope of cultures different from their own.
Spanish professor Chin-Sook Pak, who has spent a life actively traveling overseas, has experienced a constant amount of different cultural lifestyles and thus, different scents. Born and raised in South Korea, while also living in Spain for a while throughout her high school years, Chin-Sook knows what it’s like experiencing different scents.
For example, Chin-Sook’s food taste is full of diverse flavor, with special expertise in Korean and Spanish foods. Particularly, Chin-Sook enjoys kimchi, which is a Korean dish with fermented vegetables and is similar to the food known as sauerkraut.
“Kimchi can have a very strong odor because it has a lot of raw garlic, some ginger, and sometimes you have fish sauce in it,” Chin-Sook says. “And you let it ferment a little because every culture has fermented foods which the body needs.”
In Korea, the dish is so popular that Chin-Sook claims it’s “something Koreans cannot live without” and brought up an old, infamous belief that during the SARS epidemic, “Koreans really did not get SARS because they used so much kimchi.”
From Spain, Chin-Sook enjoys a particular food called the bocadillo de calamares, which is a sandwich that excites her taste buds whenever Chin-Sook visits Madrid.
“It’s a type of bread and they cut it, and they have fried squid inside it,” Chin-Sook says. “And so, when I go to the Madrid central area, bocadillo just warms me up.”
She added later that a bocadillo “smells heavenly” to her nose.
Senses also are the basis for formulating food preferences and explains why they differ from person to person. For example, different people prefer different ice cream flavors or scents of different candles.
For associate French, Arabic and Honors College professor Abdelaadim Bidaoui, the weather of his hometown in Morocco feels balanced, as it hardly ever becomes too extreme.
“You have a real feel of the seasons. The spring is a spring with beautiful flowers. Summer doesn’t get really hot. And during winter time, it doesn’t get really cold. So rain or shine, you can always go outside for a walk, and there is always an opportunity for outdoor activities,” Abdelaadim says.
According to him, Moroccan weather differs from the United States’, due to steady weather patterns of the African country versus Abdelaadim’s claim of the “very unpredictable and constantly changing ” Midwestern weather, from his experience living in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin.
As for food, Morocco’s cuisine is shaped by its lengthy history from other countries and cultures, providing a more diverse selection of food options into one style of cooking.
“The cuisine in Morocco has aspects of the Middle East, of Africa, of Europe, of [Jewish descent], millions of ingenious menus and stuff like that, which has given the Moroccan cuisine some sort of taste, that is why it is ranked among the best cuisines in the world.”
Abdelaadim Bidaoui, Associate French, Arabic and Honors College professor at Ball State University
TasteAtlas, a travel guide source, published a list of 50 countries where Moroccan cuisine placed 32 in the year 2021. Abdelaadim also added that Moroccan cuisine is filled with plenty of vegetables and “relies heavily on healthy stuff, like olive oil.”
Abdelaadim ate Moroccan food a lot with his family, living up to the family-oriented cultural norm of the country.
“Food time is really honored … When I grew up, my parents would never miss mealtime,” Abdelaadim says. “And you cannot miss mealtime with the family, unless you have a really strong excuse.”
Memories with Abdelaadim’s family such as eating time are one of the numerous examples showcasing how influential the senses are for shaping memories, along with the emotions associated with them.
For example, according to Anne-Marie Mouly and Regina Sullivan, authors of “The Neurology of Olfaction,” “…One of the most striking features of odor memory in humans resides in the amazing powers of odors to vividly trigger the evocation of autobiographical experiences.”
For Chin-Sook, past memories, and the emotions felt during those moments, shape her worldview and the types of scents she prefers because of the positive experiences she reflects upon from those memories.
“Our memories are selective. We tend to remember things not by the way they are, but remember with the particular feelings that we have at the moment.”
Chin-Sook Pak, Spanish professor at Ball State University
From the perspective of Abdelaadim, he cooks Moroccan food in his spare time, which gives him memories of home whenever he feels homesick.
“It’s like a therapeutic activity; it’s healing. When I prepare a dish from Morocco in America, it brings back nice memories. The spices, the smell of the food is very healing and relaxing, and I can tell it’s anxiety repellant,” Abdelaadim says.
Chin-Sook also believes the state of inner being of an individual and the emotions they’re currently experiencing during a particular moment of time determines how they’ll reflect on the senses around them in the future.
“Let’s say I am relaxed and I feel calm, and I’m walking outside of the [North] Quad and I say ‘this is heaven,’” Chin-Sook says. “And the cool crisp fall air feels [to me] like ‘now why does anyone need to move anywhere’ when Muncie’s a paradise on a day like today, when I slept well, I had a good meal, and I didn’t get into any conflict with other people.’”
Furthermore, Chin-Sook believes changing outlooks on different senses is attainable, so long as people’s daily, high-maintenance lives do not distract from the material world around them.
“When we are so busy in a productivity-driven world, it’s hard to notice well,” Chin-Sook says. ”Everything can smell and feel wholesome if I am in the right state of being.”
Sources: TasteAtlas
