It's been well over a year, and things bloody do not taste or smell right anymore.
I feel that, more than you could ever know. (Or perhaps, just as much.)
Does everything taste sort of like prison food to you and smell like literal garbage water?
To answer a question I wasn't asked: Yes. Walking through a food court at noon now smells like a dumpster, though at the wrong distance - close food smells like a dumpster a little farther away, so it's had time to mix with some air and fade a bit. Unpleasant AND confusing.
To no doubt rehash a couple of old posts of mine: I used to sometimes spend my lunch hour not eating. I'd walk to a well-maintained green space, sit down, and read by the roses. Now, it's all I do. Whites smell OK-but-off but reds still smell the same as I remember, so I go out of my way to sit down by some reds if I can. (I never liked the pink cultivar there, was always obnoxious and smelled like someone was attempting to replicate bubblegum in a plant. Now it smells almost like the reds.) Winter's going to be oddly sad for me.
Red meat by and large tastes and smells like... well, like chemicals. And not in the "oooh, everything is a chemical" sense, but in the caustic-bad-get-away sense. It's like a mix of the stuff used to perm hair and the smell I recall when I lived in oil country whenever the wind was coming from the industrial quarter. Chicken and body odor now smell the same, like some odd fusion of what the two used to smell like.
Fast food has gone from meh-but-filling to tastes-like-actual-poison now. Someone took me out for breakfast at A&W after I recovered and it was... interesting. He ate all of his and half of mine (I wasn't hungry after I smelled it) and said it was fine. I did some experimental tastes of each part alone and was shocked to find the bacon, the eggs, and the hash brown all tasted exactly the same. (Vile, but that's beside the point, they were the SAME vile.) The sausage was lousy like usual, but it was the lousy I remembered from before - that's when I realized they were shilling one of those almost-meat vegan sausage things. So I started wondering if it was the taste of meat that was damaged and bought a few vegetables to taste test. They seem (mostly - it's always "mostly") the same. Shame I never liked vegetables to start with.
I also cooked some bacon I'd bought and tried it. A different terrible from fast food bacon but still terrible. A friend of mine hypothesized that "maybe you're tasting the rot", the idea being that all food decays (if only slightly) as soon as it stops being part of a living thing, and maybe those trace amounts of the first broken-down proteins in meat are all I'm getting so it's magnified. He said if I can ever get out to one of the outskirt farms to see if I can arrange a time to get a steak that was walking a couple hours ago. An interesting experiment to be sure but I'm not sure what it'll prove since I have no pre-covid memory of meat that fresh.
Cheese: Mostly tastes like... I don't know. Blunted. Like cheese trying desperately to be inoffensive. I can't tell the difference between Swiss, Havarti, and Mozzarella anymore, except by texture. The Parmesan I used to buy (off of a wheel, so not exactly Kraft tube quality here) now is more like... cheesy green apples? It's not poison but it's hardly something I enjoy. Found the store brand stuff at least still tastes like some-cheese and no not-cheese and switched to that for my salads. (I eat a lot of salads now - Caesar hasn't changed much at all, even the dressing despite the use of anchovies. Also if I feel I need meat I can get some chicken and cut it small enough that it mixes in with the dressing and I can barely taste it.)
Bread has a bit of the new meat taste now, but it didn't fall as far. I can still eat a good sourdough but store loafs have gone from bland to unpleasant. Butter's kinda OK? Merely "off", not "bad".
Milk is still milk. Pop is - pop but sharper; cream soda of all things seems the most palatable now. I don't really drink alcohol but beer (by which I mean IPAs, the only ones I liked enough to have on occasion) seems beer-ish enough. Though I can't tell brands apart anymore, it's all "beer". I guess it's the hops?
My favorite desserts are mostly the same but blunted. I actually gained weight for a while there because I started chasing the feeling of fullness without realizing it, only just got back down to my old weight.
I don't eat out much anymore. One place I used to go that made a great omelet and OK bacon was an exception, as now it's more a so-so omelet and tolerable bacon but that's as good as it gets for me now. But with all the lockdown stupidity the owner/cook had to downsize to one waitress a few weeks back and it just had to be the annoying political one. I'm not going to sit there eating food I can't taste right and get lectured on covid from someone who hasn't had it but has all the answers. If she was gone I might start going there again every couple weeks, just for some meat and eggs I can eat. I guess I'll get a pizza this week from the pizza place I always used to go to. Was amazing, now palatable, but I just realized that if I don't do that I'll have NO meat in my diet this week so I guess it's got priority now.
But I'm rambling. Sorry for the TMI, but most people think I'm hamming it up or that I'm crazy. It feels good to finally vent all this and know that SOMEONE other than my two oldest and best friends will believe me.
Had twice...i feel this is permanent cause i am starting to forget ehat things taste and smell like
I don't think I am, but only because of my dreams. Not kidding - taste and smell has become a notable element of my dreams, enough that it sticks with me. I can't tell you what the hell my dreams are about except that two nights ago I had one that involved fresh-baked bread. It was nice. I miss that.
