Nose Dive: A Scent-ual Conversation and Smell-Along with Harold McGee

Join Harold McGee, legendary author of On Food and Cooking for a conversation with food science writer and historian Nadia Berenstein, as they discuss his new book Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells, an extensive exploration of the long-overlooked world of smell.

In Nose Dive, McGee takes us on a sensory adventure, from the sulfurous nascent earth more than four billion years ago, to the fruit-filled Tian Shan mountain range north of the Himalayas, to the keyboard of your laptop, where trace notes of phenol and formaldehyde escape between the keys. Through it all, McGee familiarizes us with the actual bits of matter that we breathe in—the molecules that trigger our perceptions, that prompt the citrusy smells of coriander and beer and the medicinal smells of daffodils and sea urchins.

In this virtual program, Harold will lead an interactive “smell-along” with foods and other items you’ll be able to easily access in time for the event. Join us for an olfactory journey as Harold reveals how our sense of smell has the power to expose invisible, intangible details of our material world and trigger in us feelings that are the very essence of being alive.

Tickets include the option to purchase Nose Dive, shipped to your door by Kitchen Arts & Letters in New York City.

Harold McGee writes about the science of food and cooking. He is the author of the award-winning classic On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen and Keys to Good Cooking: A Guide to Making the Best of Foods and Recipes, and a former columnist for The New York Times. He has been named food writer of the year by Bon Appétit magazine and to the Time 100, an annual list of the world’s most influential people. Since 2010, he has been a visiting lecturer for Harvard University’s course “Science & Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science.” McGee lives in San Francisco.

Nadia Berenstein is a James Beard award-winning food writer and historian who writes about science, technology, and culture, mostly in the context of food. She holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in History & Sociology of Science and is currently working on a book about synthetic flavors and the people and companies who make them.

She was an advisor to MOFAD for their inaugural exhibit, “Flavor: Making It And Faking It.” To read Nadia’s essays about the history of flavor/science/technology/food/culture visit her blog, nadiaberenstein.com/blog.