Sense of Smell, BBQ, and Culture
It’s hard to imagine life without a grill, because the joy of preparing fresh food in this way has some spectacular side effects. There is a very pleasant feeling when you’re spreading a barbecue marinade you’ve been experimenting with over a nice piece of fresh chicken breast, and you start to see your guests start to get distracted by the smell. First, there’s a little bit of movement, that’s almost unnoticeable, where they might start pausing in their conversations a bit, or the frisbee game takes a sloppy turn suddenly. This is usually followed by a flurry of graceful gestures and motions, as if to cover up the moment before, but then the smell starts to waft again, and they are suddenly reminded that they are enormously hungry.
Food and smell has a peculiar reaction on people and animals. It wakes up some of the earliest memories that we have, and every time we smell barbecue chicken, the synapses in the brain take us back to the very first time. Because the relationship between smell and cooking is so much more powerful when it’s outdoors, the memories that it awakens are much stronger, and this is one of the reasons why the summer meal cooked on built in bbq grills has such a powerful attraction for all of us. People often remark on the way cooking outdoors can remind you of your happiest summer memories because of the smell, and there is actual physiological responses in the body that make this true.
There may be plenty of other reasons why the effect is so powerful, and it’s very likely that cooking and culture are intimately connected in ways we don’t yet understand. But as long as we’re able to continue grilling fantastic chicken, we’ll be learning about why we like the things we do. It seems likely, even, that in our lifetime, we’ll have a better understanding between smell, culture, and memory, but even when we do, we won’t be able to stop our mouths from watering, and there’s very little reason to even want to.
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