When a head injury obliterated twenty-two-year-old Molly Birnbaum's sense of smell, it destroyed her dream of becoming a chef. Determined to reawaken her nose, she bravely sets off on a quest to rediscover the scented world. On the way, she seeks out everyone from former poet laureate Robert Pinsky to neuroscientist Oliver Sacks. A moving personal story packed with surprising facts about the senses, Season to Taste brims with the scents of Molly's world--cinnamon, cedarwood, fresh bagels, and lavender--lost and finally found. In Season to Taste, Molly describes an ineffable, but indispensable, layer of life.

When an accident obliterated Molly Birnbaum's sense of smell, it also destroyed her dream of becoming a chef, and sent her instead upon a brave and uncertain mission to reawaken her nose. Writing with emotional honesty, intellectual curiosity, and a foodie's feel for descriptive precision, she explores the science of olfaction and pheromones, ponders Proust's madeleine and her own scent memory, and quizzes psychologists, perfumiers, and ice-cream inventors, all in an effort to overcome her condition. From cinnamon and cedarwood to bacon and her boyfriend's shirt, we follow Molly as she gradually rediscovers the scented world and captures in apt, piquant words the rich layer of life that tends to be wordless.