Increasingly, loss of the sense of smell is being treated as a serious harm in clinical settings. Besides, the sense of smell is key to flavour perception. Indeed, most of what you perceive as the taste of food and drink is actually smell, being caused by volatile chemicals travelling from the cavity of your mouth through the open space of the pharynx up to your nasal epithelium. And there’s no way around it: the spice trade, with its growth following the Silk Road, has shaped the modern global socioeconomic landscape as much as – if not more than – philosophical discussion on reason and morality. – Aeon