The Odor Becomes You
What's the scent of occupying a place in the world?
Last week the Guardian reported on legislative efforts in New Mexico to designate an official state aroma: the blistered green pungency of Hatch chiles roasting over naked flames. “I have tried to think of any other state that has a smell or aroma that is that distinctive statewide,” a state senator told a reporter. “And I can’t think of any.” A push for tourist branding, I suppose—hard to fault them, really. In season, a vendor here in Tucson fills the air of a weekly farmers’ market with that lush, burnt aroma of roasting Hatch peppers, and I’ve never thought of it as anything other than part of this particular piece of borderland, 130 highway miles from New Mexico’s state line.
But how could any single scent drift across the entire geography of a state, no matter the total farmers’ markets blasting propane fire under spinning drum cages? And how many Midwest states could lay claim to the scorched-sugar scent of corn ears roasting in the husk at summer fairs?
What is the scent of place? The sensory hold over the inevitably small piece of land through which most of us move? What’s the scent of occupying a place in the world? Could smell be more determinative of our lives—our emotions, our experience of a place—than taste?
Perry and I lived in Chicago in the ‘90s, in a rapidly changing area of Ukrainian Village. An old sausage factory was still operating out of a house-sized building at the end of our block, and in the eye of winter—those days when deep cold suppresses the slightest movements of air—the smell of garlicky smoked pork sausage hung stiffly like a frozen canvas tarp around our block, defining where we lived, fixing us in a historical narrative of immigration and settlement that seeped in through closed windows
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In 2015, on assignment for a magazine, I followed the chef Enrique Olvera around Mexico City. We walked through Mercado de San Cosme—Olvera’s grandfather lived six blocks away, in Colonia San Rafael, and little-kid Enrique used to haunt this place. It’s a market off the tourist circuit—stalls selling clothes and shiny pink backpacks, plastic colanders and socks, piñatas like spiky Bethlehem stars at every stage of construction. In the phantom green light of fluorescent tubes Olvera ambled down one of the lanes toward the skylit center and the comida corrida stalls that stood quiet at mid-morning, not yet open. He pointed out zapotes negros and miel magueys, fruits he loves, and a cardboard box of black-spotted bananas, each no bigger than a baby’s foot.
“Fruit in Mexico is always overripe,” he said, holding up a hand of decaying bananas, signaling to the girl that he wanted to buy. “It’s the taste of moles, the smell of chiles that have been drying out. People will drop the peel from an orange on the ground and it stays there to rot. It’s in the air.”
I felt that with every intake of breath—each gorgeous whiff of fecund decay—I was literally absorbing the city. (Absorb, from the Latin ab plus sorbere, meaning “to suck up.”)
What is the scent of San Francisco? asks Bruce Cole in his Eat.Drink.Think. newsletter from Edible San Francisco. “From our location here in West Portal,” he writes, “we’d say the fog/marine layer might qualify… Because no matter where you live in the city, it will creep in through the cracks of your window sills sooner or later.
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I have a 1961 copy of the travel magazine Holiday. In a sprawling feature on the city, the writer Eugene Burdick (co-author of The Ugly American) spins a story of San Francisco through its smells—to capture the volatile spirit of a place. He draws an olfactory map that shifts according to the clock.
“The day odors are commercial and bustling: the stench of tannic acid and hides, the rank odor from chemical plants, the coffee and spice fumes, the sweet and heavy odor of gardenias from the sidewalk florist stalls.”
A faithful progressive, Burdick tells us how the city’s odor is segregated by gender and class:
[T]he amalgam of malted milks and toasted cheese and pimiento and tomato—the lunch of multitudes of office girls. The heavy rich lunches of the Concordia and the Pacific Union Club and the Bohemian Club, with their overlay of martinis and hollandaise and crab Louis…
And at night, the class divisions erode, at least a little, in the smells of “…red wine and pizza of Columbus Avenue and North Beach, the salami and sourdough of a hundred restaurants…the rice and curry and soy sauce and grape leaf and Pimm’s Cup and pork chops and grits and greens and hot fat and pastrami from the open windows of a thousand apartments and houses.”
This is an ecstatic vision—uh, an ecstatic odor—of plurality, a Beat vision: Walt Whitman regarding the peaches and the penumbras in Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California,” snuffing the sidel of evening, eyeing the grocery boys, sucking up multitudes.
In his 2020 book Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells, Harold McGee begins with an epigraph from Jean-Paul Sartre:
The smell of a person’s body is the body itself which we breathe in through our nose and mouth, which we suddenly posses as though it were the body’s most secret substance and, in short, its nature…a vaporized body which has remained completely itself , but which has become a volatile spirit.
A romantic conceit, worthy of Proust. I like that idea of the volatile spirit applied to place, as if living somewhere long enough is capable of altering us, invading our DNA, making us different than we were before. Covid has made the invisible real for me, turned the implied—the unseen, ambient elements of a place; the air I breathe and the particles it contains—into literalness: a story I can’t ignore. Because no matter where you live, to paraphrase Bruce Cole, the atomized fabric of wherever you stand in the world and the history of which you are inevitably a part will creep in through the cracks of your window sills sooner or later. They will become you.