A Food Critic Loses Her Sense of Smell

<p>For Tejal Rao, a restaurant critic for The Times, a sense of smell is crucial to what she does. After she contracted the coronavirus, it disappeared. It felt almost instant.</p><p>“If you’re not used to it, you don’t know what’s going on,” she said. “It’s almost like wearing a blindfold.”</p><p>We follow Tejal on her journey with home remedies and therapies to reclaim her sense. </p><p>Guest: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/by/tejal-rao">Tejal Rao</a>, a California restaurant critic and columnist for The New York Times.</p><p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/newsletters/signup/NTTD?smid=pc-thedaily">Sign up here</a> to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/newsletters/the-daily?module=inline">subscribe to our newsletter</a>. </p><p>Background reading: </p><ul><li>Regaining a sense of smell is tedious and slow, but Tejal is using the<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/dining/covid-loss-of-smell.html?smid=pc-thedaily"> only therapy proven to work.</a></li><li>Listen to our Sunday Read about <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/31/podcasts/the-daily/coronavirus-loss-of-smell-anosmia.html">how the coronavirus could precipitate a global understanding</a> of the sense of smell, which has long been disregarded as the least important sense.</li></ul><p>For more information on today’s episode, visit <a href="http://nytimes.com/thedaily?smid=pc-thedaily">nytimes.com/thedaily.</a></p><p> Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.</p>