If you give someone a jar containing a particular smell and tell them it's vomit, they'll almost certainly think the smell is disgusting – and even want to leave the room.
But give them the same smelly jar – now labelled "parmesan cheese" – and they'll want to put it on pasta.
Seriously – this very experiment was done back in 2001, with these exact results…results that made me question how I feel about parmesan, puke, and my own sense of smell.
This is MinuteFood.
The idea of confusing the smell of parmesan – one of the most popular cheeses in the world – with vomit might sound ridiculous, but once you start digging, you'll find tons of anecdotal evidence of this exact phenomenon.
And not that long ago, I actually had an experience where – in the middle of the night – I mistook the smell of vomit for the smell of pasta.
I was horrified – both at the vomit itself, AND at the fact that I could legitimately confuse such a disgusting thing with such a delicious one.
Chemically, though, parm and puke have some important stuff in common: short chain fatty acids.
These molecules are produced when anaerobic bacteria break down their food – which you probably know as " fermentation" – a process which happens both in cheese, and in the contents of your stomach.
Anything that's bacterially-fermented will contain short-chain fatty acids, all of which are volatile and have strong, distinctive smells; parmesan cheese just happens to contain two of the very same short chain fatty acids as your stomach contents – butyric acid and isovaleric acid – in about the right quantities to create a scent that's at least somewhat similar.
