I worked with a guy in the kitchen who would always burn the bread in the salamander. We were outside smoking one day and I asked him about it and he said he had no sense of smell. I thought it was strange to be a cook who couldn't smell, but then the whole not noticing bread burning made sense.
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2026
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Useful for those whose noses were affected long term by COVID.
How much will food companies pay to get it to tell you that your food is bad early so you go shopping sooner?
Will it be able to tell the difference between blue cheese and rotting blue cheese?
I can imagine people testing the hell out of it on blue cheese and rotting blue cheese and even more immature tests like when someone farts or something.
My wife and I would love something like this; she is anosmic and I am the dedicated suspicious food sniffer.
Also my own nose can, although that came free with my body. How much will this cost me?
This is for everyone whose factory included nose stopped working after the warranty ran out.
And not all are covid related. I know at least one person who couldn't smell because of a brain injury, years before covid19 came around.
Interesting, that must suck sometimes.
My smeller isn't that sensitive.
Bet you it is, if you just know what to smell for. 👃❤️
Bet you it isn't, since they just told us they have a diminished sense of smell
Bet you it is, since most people are simply unawarw of the things they should be smelling for, and since many people don't cook their own food they have no confidence in their abilities.
Seems a little weird to assume diminished sense of smell based on their comment comparing their sense to that of an electronic device tailor made for smelling...
Does practice cooking improve your ability to smell when food has gone bad? It seems like an instinctual hardwired thing to me.
I didn't interpret their comment to mean that their nose is not as sensitive as the electronic sensor, I read it as "my nose isn't very sensitive".
The experience does help when it's ambiguous, since you can tell that it shouldn't be like that before it gets to a point where you retch.
Plus it also helps you tell when your sense of smell is throwing a false positive. For me personally, I'd be more likely to lean on my cooking experience, since my hardwiring would automatically file all raw meat, including fresh from the butcher, as being off.
Sometimes people say they can't do things just because of lack of experience. Maybe they just think it is.
Just trying to be hopeful. 🫶
I believe you had good intentions. And maybe I brought my own baggage to this thread.
Anyway, I said what I did because it can be frustrating for folks with disabilities to be told things like "I believe in you". These well-intentioned responses indicate that you don't believe their disability is real.
If you tell me you have a disability, I believe you. I didn't see them say that outright. It was very open to interpretation. 🙂
Wondering if it also works on pathogens like Listeria or Clostridium botulinum, and if they have an idea to resolve the food matrix issues. Easily a million dollar industry only for food manufacturing alone, then.
If you can make a Jacobson to Vestigial transpiler, I’ll attach it to my face and see what all the rage is about with these fire hydrants.
Obvious this is gonna be used in some industrial purposes
I worked at a company making a project to auto detect poopy diapers (help new parents change them quicker and track schedules — unclear if there's real benefit but anyway). It turned out to be surprisingly hard to differentiate poop from other organic odors, like coffee.
Anyway, I could see better auto olfactory sensors having applications outside of food.
Lol what 🤣
My solution is to send a message of "if it ain't coffee then you got shut to clean"
maybe useful in mining or refineries to detect gas leaks etc.
Smell-o-vision, here we come!
Bad news for anyone living where weed is illegal.
Honestly, this is a really cool result. Since it’s a prototype I’m sure it’s wildly expensive right now, but eventually it’ll come down in cost that you can buy sensors like this for cheap. Rather than throwing stuff away once it’s past the expiration date, you now would wait for a positive sensor hit instead. Would really reduce food waste which is a huge problem.
You know what also has hundreds of millions of years of development in detecting what's gone bad, and costs you nothing?! Your actual nose! It's also almost certainly better than this product. Just smell your food. It'll tell you when something has gone bad. The date on it, or anything else, doesn't.
Ableist comment.
This is so stupid. We can talk about things that would only benefit a tiny number of people without mentioning them every time. This comment is like saying "talking about eating pork is antisemitic." No it isn't. It isn't ableist to not mention something. Ableist is a specific hatred against otherly-abled/disabled/whatever term people.
Top comment for me right now offers anosmia as a reason to want this kind of solution
You didn't ask but the statement of facts implied you might see that as interesting and valid
Yeah, I did think about including that in my comment as a caveat, but it's obvious enough. This could be a good product for a very tiny number of people. There's going to be an attempt to sell it to the average person though, and the average person should ignore it.
It might make sense for industrial applications, where they can use it to tell if something has gone off before shipping it out, or having someone sniff all the food.
Average people will ignore it until economy of scale kicks in
Even if it doesn't do shit if it is cheap enough people will buy it
And only when abundant enough will people start messing with the tech and rebel against it's premise by doing new things that hadn't been conceived before
Maybe parkinson's could be smelt by it
Or maybe someone smells the moon with one
We might start sniffing black holes next and find out we have a wagging tailbone and then realise