About Tasteless Cooking
I lost my sense of smell and with it, my sense of taste.
I can still detect salt, sweet, acid, bitterness, some umami, and chemical heat, but flavour is gone.
I’ve spent most of my life cooking and I’m not ready to give that up. Tasteless Cooking is my attempt to understand and communicate how food can still be wonderful.
What I’m trying to do
No one should go hungry. That’s the starting point.
But beyond that, food should still be something people can experience.
Whether that means removing the stress of where the next meal is coming from, or turning functional food into something to actually enjoy, I want this site to help where it can.
I just want to make things better where I’m able.
About me
I have nasal polyps. I can’t smell anything, which means I can’t taste anything beyond salt, sweet, acid, bitter, some umami, and chemical heat.
I can tell if something is too salty. I just can’t tell what it tastes like.
I’ve been cooking since I was 15. I’ve cooked for more people than I can count. I've been a business owner in the food industry.
Cooking isn’t a hobby for me, it’s a constant learning experience. Losing my senses of smell and taste hasn’t changed that. It's forced me to re-evaluate everything.
The long version
The short version is simple: For my senses of taste and smell: Lost them, got them back, lost them, got them back, lost them, and here we are.
The Long and Boringness of it All...Seriously, don't read this. It's tedious and all me me me stuff.
The first time this happened to me, it turned up in stealth mode. Now in 2026 it's the third time.
Let's go back to late 2004. . . The first thing I notice is the constant need to blow my nose. Thinking I've got allergies or something, I try the usual medication. That doesn't work. This goes on for months.
It's now 2005. The next thing is the headaches. Recurring headaches. And then the recuring headaches stop. They stop because now, I have a permanent headache. This headache lasts for eleven weeks.
Seriously.
Eleven Weeks.
Constantly.
Actually, that's a lie. At week seven on a Saturday. A Saturday afternoon. A Saturday afternoon at 1:14 whilst I'm having a pint in the pub with mates, and playing pool, something changed. I didn't have a headache.
It was like the pressure was suddenly sucked out of my head.
It was like I suddenly weighed thirty pounds less. Which I could've done with.
It. Was. Beautiful.
I was free.
It lasted one hour and fifty-seven minutes.
My head was then, instantly transported back to a diving bell at Challenger Deep.
My GP referred me to a guy who did MRIs and inserted long things into my head through my nose.
I had nasal polyps.
Options: 1. Spray drugs into your nose whilst doing a headstand twice a day for life. 2. Cut them out - but they could return in twenty years.
The experience after surgery of having the bloody tampons pulled out of my nose as they squirted two-week-old clotted blood down my throat, was mildly offset by the carnage I inflicted on the doctor as I coughed and sneezed at the same time. Dexter would've had that doctor convicted of mass brutal murder with a chainsaw. I'm still so so sorry doctor Shaw.
I could breathe again and things were different. Watching the TV I thought something smelled off in the flat. Walking around, I ended up in the kitchen. The smell is here, but where? It's the fridge. I open the fridge and the smell is intense. Taleggio. It's a block of ripe taleggio in the fridge.
I realise that I'd lost my sense of smell gradually over the last year. It's joyous and disturbing.
I forget this over the coming years. . .
Sleeping is becoming difficult. I'm constantly blowing my nose but it's not clearing. I know it's the polyps starting again. The GP refers me and the surgeon explains the risks of the surgery and offers a lifetime of headstands and nasal sprays.
It's February 2025 and I'm standing in the Pharmacy fresh out of hospital and waiting to collect the post surgery drugs with a bandage across my face, and blood is oozing out everywhere but I have to wait because the pharmacist needs to explain to someone how to take aspirin. The disgusting degradable slugs in my nasal cavity seem never ending but by late March 2025 just the occasional clot is blowing out with my daily nose squirty rinsing blowout.
I can now smell spring in Australia from Ontario. It's great! I have truffle omeletes for lunch and alternate between white and black. I have elderflower cocktails and île flottante for dessert. I want to cook again. It's early August and I've a post-surgery review with the surgeon later in the month. Washing my hands I splash my face, dry myself then stop. .... That handwash has a really strong smell. I don't smell it. I go back and squeeze a blob out and smell it. Nothing. Nothing.
The surgeon confirms I've a whole new set of polyps. I schedule surgery for the end of 2026 and also start a program of injected mepoluzimab.
I had expected another twenty years of cooking with taste. Instead, here I am in 2026, building Tasteless Cooking.