Every six months or so, after reading or watching a lot of Sherlock Holmes, I get the urge to smoke a pipe. I generally smoke a couple bowls, remember that I don't particularly enjoy it, and then store the pipe again.
During my most recent episode, I became particularly annoyed with the degree to which smoking utterly destroys the sense of taste. I could hardly discern even the strongest flavors for more than an hour after I'd put the pipe down.
This got me to thinking about the relationship between smoking and food:
1. Smokers famously weigh less than others, a fact that's generally credited to the effects of nicotine and other chemicals. I'd guess, however, that smokers also tend to eat less because they've destroyed their sense of taste and get less pleasure from food.
2. Restaurants have, in general, increased the intensity of the flavor in their dishes over the past few decades, a period that has seen smoking rates halve. At first this struck me as counterintuitive. Shouldn't flavors grow more subtle as a society's tastebuds become more sensitive? Then I decided that perhaps chefs didn't even bother back when fifty percent of men (who paid the bills) were smoking.
3. Perhaps the terrible reputation of mid-century cuisine stems from the fact that many chefs and many restaurant critics were themselves smokers. If so, how could smokers with dead tongues not get crowded out by non-smokers who could actually taste things? Yes, a lot of people smoked fifty years ago, but it was never even half the adult population.
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