Had a bad experience a few weeks ago when I was drinking milk from a freshly-opened bottle of milk, and after I had almost finished my first glass I started thinking something was off about the taste. I figured that if it was expired, I would have noticed by now. So I poured my second glass, and to my horror chunks came out.
I wish I had thought of returning the bottle before I dumped it all down the sink in a panic. I would have liked my four dollars back.
I was put off of milk for weeks after that. Now I’m paranoid. As stated in the title, I can’t smell, so my sense of taste is also not the best. I just got more milk, and I can’t tell if the milk I just drank is actually slightly sour or if I’m just placebo-effecting the taste into being because I am expecting it to be spoiled. Is there a test I can do that will prove the milk is not spoiled?
I’m anosmic too and I had the same experience in college. I never had to deal with “fresh” milk ever being not so fresh though. Although after reading your post, I think I’ll get a pitcher for milk so i can pour out the bottle when I get it to double check for chunks. You could try that too, but I can’t say how well it works.
I don’t think I can taste if milk is sour, but I’ve developed a tolerance to food that’s gone a bit bad anyway.
Technically my problem isn’t that I can’t smell at all, it’s that I have pretty much every seasonal allergy so when I was growing up I never had the opportunity to learn how to use my nose. As a kid my parents tried to address this with decongestant, but I think I built up a tolerance because they stopped working for me. Every once in a blue moon, there will be two weeks where I can actually smell things, but I will consistently misidentify what I am smelling since I never learned how to smell. This leads to me embarrassing myself by saying demented things like claiming flowers smell like burnt popcorn or that my fiancée’s cooking smells like burnt plastic. I suspect that not being exposed to smells at a formative age caused my brain to just not bother with the nose-interperetation part of the brain. Maybe when I die they could dissect my brain and figure that out.
I’ve thought about getting back on the decongestants again, but I don’t want to overdo it and damage my liver. I like my liver. I want to treat it well. My fiancée’s dad also told me about some shots he got to get rid of his grass allergy, so I might look into that
Ah, yeah I got my sense of smell knocked outta me when I was a kid. I’ve read about some kind of treatment to help people train their sense of smell. It came up a lot in some anosmic groups I was during the pandemic. I never looked too much into it because there’s no point, but it might be worth a trip to an ENT in your case.