Losing your sense of smell != losing your sense of taste. There’s a reason scientists/biologists have classified smell and taste as two different senses.

TASTE is what our taste buds give us. It refers to the five basic receptors in the mouth: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami. You could rip out our olfactory bulbs and we’d still “taste” food. Taste is physically different than smell. It is the result of our tongues receiving chemical information, and we can basically get five pieces of information (the five tastes) about food from taste.

FLAVOR is everything else: it is the combination of every other sensory input that we experience when consuming food. Visual appearance, atmosphere, lighting, sound, music, texture, mouth-feel—and smell. Smell is obviously the big one here. While it too is chemical, smells can give us vastly more information about food than taste can, especially when combined with other environmental factors (sound, texture, and whatnot) and the fact that smell is the sense most closely linked to memory.

So while anosmics can most certainly taste food (or much of it, at least; garlic does absolutely nothing for me and onions are crunchy and nothing else), they miss out on the huge flavor component that smell provides.

Now that I think about it, I might guess that that’s the reason why a lot of acquired anosmics tend to claim that they’ve lost their sense of taste entirely as well—because they’re so used to experiencing food WITH that added flavor component from smell, once they lose that they’re reduced to just “tasting” food, which is likely exceedingly bland in comparison. Whereas the congenital anosmic—like me—has never experienced the extra flavor from smell and thus doesn’t “know” of the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) differences that smell can create. Therefore, for them, most foods are still very distinguishable from one another.

So there.

The next article I read that says “anosmics can’t tell the difference between a raw potato and an apple,” I’mma start stabbing fellows.