# Observe and smell your food before eating it While supermarkets have brought an abundance of food to the general population, they are also ==**a major cause of our current sensory disconnect from food**==. People used to taste, smell, handle and even listen to the sounds of food to decide whether to buy it or not; now, we only look at it, if it is not inside an opaque plastic box. Anthropologists have noticed that, ==**as societies modernise, the sense of sight tends to become more important, at the expense of smell**==, which has almost become a "mute sense" in our current society. One can observe that in our language itself: **we can describe visual features with a much larger choice of words than olfactory ones**. The standardisation of highly-processed foods made global hunger regress, but junk food is hardly better than no food at all, and the prevalence of obesity and malnutrition in so many countries is alarming. The key to returning to a healthier relationship with food does not lie in diets; rather, **==a more sensible step is to make the effort to discover, again, how wonderful it is to smell, touch and look at the contents of your plate==**. The gradual decline in plastic usage and the rise of home cooking—partly thanks to the pandemic—should encourage this reversal and are reasons to be hopeful. --- ## 📚 References - Wilson, Bee. 'How We Lost Our Sensory Connection with Food – and How to Restore It'. The Guardian, 29 Mar. 2022. The Guardian, <https://www.theguardian.com/food/2022/mar/29/how-we-lost-our-sensory-connection-with-food-and-how-to-restore-it>.