Season to Taste - A Review

An aspiring chef's moving account of finding her way—in the kitchen and beyond—after a tragic accident destroys her sense of smell

At twenty-two, just out of college, Molly Birnbaum spent her nights reading cookbooks and her days working at a Boston bistro, preparing to start training at the prestigious Culinary Institute of America. She knew exactly where she wanted the life ahead to lead: She wanted to be a chef. But shortly before she was due to matriculate, she was hit by a car while out for a run in Boston. The accident fractured her skull, broke her pelvis, tore her knee to shreds—and destroyed her sense of smell. The flesh and bones would heal...but her sense of smell? And not being able to smell meant not being able to cook. She dropped her cooking school plans, quit her restaurant job, and sank into a depression.

Season to Taste is the story of what came next: how she picked herself up and set off on a grand, entertaining quest in the hopes of learning to smell again. Writing with the good cheer and great charm of Laurie Colwin or Ruth Reichl, she explores the science of olfaction, pheromones, and Proust's madeleine; she meets leading experts, including the writer Oliver Sacks, scientist Stuart Firestein, and perfumer Christophe Laudamiel; and she visits a pioneering New Jersey flavor lab, eats at Grant Achatz's legendary Chicago restaurant Alinea, and enrolls at a renowned perfume school in the South of France, all in an effort to understand and overcome her condition.

A moving personal story packed with surprising facts about our senses, Season to Taste is filled with unforgettable descriptions of the smells Birnbaum rediscovers—from cinnamon, cedarwood, and fresh bagels to rosemary chicken, lavender, and apple pie—as she falls in love, learns to smell from scratch, and starts, once again, to cook.  ~ From Goodreads

Season to Taste is a semi-interesting memoir about one young woman's journey to come to terms with the impairment of her sense of smell.  The book is at its best when describing food with luscious adjectives, but too often it gets bogged down with the author's inability to structure her thoughts. 

Season to Taste constantly jumps back and forth between Molly Birnbaum's everyday struggles with regaining her sense of smell and the science behind how the brain processes scent.  I found the author to be slightly annoying, mainly for her inability to stay on topic.  I never got over this annoyance because she really never gave the reader time to know her.  Instead, any time the reader gets close, she begins spouting off more facts and figures.  Interviews popped up at random times, jarring the reader out of the narrative.  Overall, the book was just oddly paced and structured.  I would have liked it much better if she had separated her personal life into different chapters from her interviews and research.  The timeline is all over the place and indiscerible since everything is just meshed together.  I wished she had spent more time recounting the stories of others who had lost their ability to smell.  I found their stories to have much more flavor and emotional impact than her own.

I would only recommend this book to people who either have a condition similar to her own or are  interested in the science of scent.  Molly Birnbaum did bring attention to the much overlooked issue of loss of smell, and for that, she should be applauded.  I only wish her book would have been written a bit better so it could have packed a harder punch. 

I give this book two stars.