Smell After COVID & How Parosmia Changes Food Budgets

In the United States, there were over 550,000 people who tested positive for COVID-19. A number that reached 180,000,000 people worldwide, according to the CDC. While symptoms varied, a common (and weird) symptom became loss of smell. Afterward, some people noticed after their smell came back, it was distorted, making some food smell and taste rancid. This phenomenon spiked thousands of Google searches for the term “Parosmia”. I was one of those who dealt with Parosmia, and while it’s nearly gone. I wanted to talk about Parosmia after COVID and how Parosmia is changing people’s food budgets. 

I’ll start with I’m one of those unlucky few with jacked-up smell and tastebuds. I can no longer eat my favorite foods as they now taste like rancid trash. My go-to budget food like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are now a pipe dream as peanut butter tastes like Styrofoam. It’s a rough life, but smells and tastebuds do come back.

Parosmia Is Just Screwed Up Smell and Taste

Parosmia is common after a viral infection like colds but became more popular due to COVID-19. WebMD says perhaps up to 7% of the people who had COVID-19 developed a distorted sense of smell called “Parosmia.” People discover it about 2.5 months after the initial COVID-19 infection, and it can continue for at least six months.

What’s frustrating is how closely your sense of smell is tied to taste. When your smell and taste are off, it’s surprising how much it affects your entire life. 

Imagine 30% of Food Tasting Like Garbage, That’s Parosmia

Here’s the deal. Having a screwed-up sense of smell is terrible, but Parosmia takes it to a new level. For most people, it takes the scent of specific food profiles and replaces them with the smell of rancid garbage.

Weirdly, the smell is of the same rotten garbage. Like my brain forgot what 30% of food smells like and replaced it with a generic smell of rotten garbage. For example, I’ve noticed that everything from Pizza to a McDonald’s Big Mac to a moldy wet towel has the same horrible garbage smell. 

When things smell like rotten garbage, they also taste like rotten garbage. This has significantly changed my weekly grocery list!

Everyday Foods That Smell & Taste Terrible With Parosmia

Here is a list of foods that smell and therefore taste terrible, taken from my personal experience and the numerous Parosmia Facebook/Instagram Groups that have popped up since 2019. 

Each person seems to have slightly different degrees of how bad foods are and what causes their rancid smells, but here are the common culprits.

Foods That Smell & Taste Terrible

• Chicken
• Eggs
• Bacon
• Onions (bye-bye Pizza & Pasta)
• Garlic
• Fish
• Beans
• Peanut Butter
• Coffee

From personal experience, these foods taste terrible. Even if you force yourself to eat through the terrible rancid taste, I’ve learned your body still finds a way to reject it. I won’t go into more detail there but think bathroom. 

Most of this is trial and error, as the Parosmia community cannot find a common denominator for what makes certain foods smell rancid.

Even if you remove all of these items from your house, it’s still a challenge ever going out with friends.

I find myself at restaurants going through the ingredients of each dish and trying to avoid those mentioned above. A tedious process where onions and garlic make most dishes impossible to avoid. Then the process of explaining the complex nature of Parosmia to your waiter in hopes of substitution is enough to make me want to crawl under the table. 

Foods That Seem To Be OK With Parosmia

I’ll start that most food will always taste a little off with Parosmia. There is no way to get around it. Simply your nose is broken so that food will feel a little off. 

The best you can hope for is food tasting tolerable because asking for food to taste good again is like asking to fly.

Here is my weekly grocery list with parosmia. It’s nothing special but has become a safe haven for my deteriorated taste buds. It’s heavy on fresh fruit, ramen noodles, and protein shakes. 

Here is my Parosmia grocery list for my family:

• Bread
• Milk
• Apples
• Strawberries
• Grapes
• Cuties
• Diced Tomatoes
• Mozzarella Cheese
• Potatoes
• Eggs
• Mac & Cheese
• Ground Beef
• Cereal
• Protein Shakes 
• Ramen Noodles

These have seemed pretty safe for my family, but I’ll add that anything sugary like cereal is also OK. It appears that sugary foods mask any rancid taste. 

I know most people will balk at the surgery cereal, but it pretty much saved me when my smell and taste first started to skew. It was the only thing I could eat without gagging. I used sugary cereal as a base and started to branch out and experiment with other foods from there. However, as you may expect, the sugary cereal was KILLER on my diet, and my workouts had to compensate heavily, which was great for walking with Stepbet. So learn from my mistakes for your grocery list. 

I’ve added a protein shake to most of my meals to get my daily protein since I can’t eat chicken like I used to.

Bland Food Is Your Friend, But So Is Spice

At first, I only ate bland food with simple ingredients. I figured I could swap out ingredients to find which foods caused the worst reactions. Learning from trial and error became second nature during Parosmia. 

HOWEVER, as you may expect, my family had a short tolerance for bland food. It was safe, but the monotony was draining our morale. So we discovered an unexpected craving, spice.

Let me preface, myself and my family is NOT a fan of spicy food. We were total wimps when it came to any heat levels. Yet, spice became a welcome addition to all our meals that breathed new life into our meals. We used bottles of spices like red chili pepper for the first time since we bought a spice rack. It was an incredible discovery!

Our Favorite Meal During Parosmia

In addition to buying Ramen noodles in bulk for their bland, safe flavor, we practiced with different recipes at night to find new flavors that friendly to our pallets. Here is one of my family’s favorite recipes. 

• Homemade Pizzas – Take Nann Bread as your crust. We usually top with store-bought pasta sauce, but it’s packed with onions and garlic. So we create a homemade sauce with a can of diced tomatoes and blend them into a sauce with red pepper flakes. The heat helps with the bland flavor. Then add fresh mozzarella and oven-bake for 12 minutes. It’s great!
• BONUS Tiramisu Crepes – I honestly don’t know the recipe because my girlfriend did them as a surprise and they were amazing. However, if you message us on Twitter I’ll see what I can do.

Expect Your Food Budget To Increase

One of the most significant ways my food budget has increased is that meal prep has become significantly more complicated. 

It seems that anytime I reheat meals in a microwave or oven, the reheating causes food to have more pungent rancid tastes. So we no longer do many leftovers. Most of our meals are cooked the night off.  

Also, purchasing all the ingredients from scratch makes food taste a little fresher but comes at a premium price. It’s not terrible, but something to be aware of. Luckily we have a couple of different income streams that make this easier. 

Parosmia Makes Eating Healthy Difficult, but Not Impossible

Admittedly Parosmia initially caused me to gain significant weight because the foods I’m used to eating, Pizza, Pasta, Chicken, became intolerable.

I clung to the sugary foods that provide some sense of flavor. Eventually, as I learned more, I introduced more fresh fruit and learned to cook meals from scratch to control all the ingredients. 

So I turned a horrible Parosmia experience into a learning experience teaching new skills and introducing more fresh ingredients into my diet.