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British Cooking School Life Kitchen Launches Cookbook For Those Who Have Lost Smell, Taste Due To COVID-19

CHICAGO (CBS) -- A British nonprofit cooking school has published a new cookbook geared toward people who have experienced loss of taste and smell from COVID-19.

Life Kitchen is offering "Taste & Flavour: A Cook Book to Inspire Those Experiencing Changes in Taste and Smell" as a Result of COVID" for free as a digital download.

"In it, you'll find a range of recipes that use ingredient combinations, along with textures and other sensory factors, that we hope will help you derive pleasure from food – and we've excluded the ingredients we now know most people with Covid don't fancy," Life Kitchen said on its website.

Life Kitchen learned through research that those who have lost taste and smell related to COVID-19 have experienced some distinctive symptoms. They have found they no longer want to eat things like onions, garlic, meat, and eggs, and they have found that certain foods trigger parosmia – or changes or a distortion to the sense of smell; anosmia – or the loss of smell; and phantosmia – or smelling something that is not there.

"Any of these olfactory conditions can have a profound knock-on effect for physical and mental health," Life Kitchen said.

The recipes in "Taste & Flavour" have a lot of mint, wasabi, and cinnamon, which cause sensations while eating.

Life Kitchen noted that it has used its five principles of taste and flavor – umami, smell, stimulation of the trigeminal nerve responsible for sensation int the face, texture, and layering flavor – to teach more than 1,000 people with cancer to enjoy food again. The cooking school hopes to do the same with COVID sufferers.

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