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Regular news and insight from our many poets, writers, educators and facilitators

19 October 2024

Posted by Susan L. Edser

Taste and Smell

Ali Sparkes is a children’s author who leads writing sessions for Junior and Young Writers every Saturday morning at MAST Mayflower Studios. To learn more about her, visit her website: https://www.alisparkes.com.

Sue Edser, MA graduate in Creative Writing and Publishing and winner of Bournemouth University’s Vice Chancellor Award 2024, is Ali’s assistant for the sessions and writes the weekly blog. 


This was our last week exploring the senses, completing with taste and smell. Ali created a Fill-in Fun, emphasising our chosen senses to warm the groups up. The writers used rich, evocative language to narrate stories about unusual foods and unpleasant odours, such as roadkill, vomiting, and dead grandmothers.

Ali then invited some children and young people to take the blindfold test. They had to describe the foods that were presented to them without the ability to see them. These included a yellow pepper, ketchup, and an oat biscuit. They highlighted the contrast of sweet and savoury, the smell of tomato, and the detection of ginger in the biscuit.

The Junior Writers were asked to describe their favourite smells, and they suggested a wide range of them, from homemade noodles with broth to freshly cut grass. The worst smells included cow dung and cheese and onion crisps. The sense of smell is closely linked to memories, such as ice cream having connotations of holidays, damp leaves reminding people of autumn and Halloween, and cooked onions making the writers think of hot dogs and fairs.

Both groups were then given their own selection of foods to taste and smell, which included an orange segment, a tortilla chip, and chocolate. The orange was described as a crisp summer morning, succulent and floral. The tortilla chip was oily, starchy, and salty. The chocolate was described as sugary, sticky, and silky.

Enid Blyton, Percy Jackson, and Suzanne Collins described foods so well that Ali wanted to share examples with the groups. After this, the main writing exercise for the session was to write a story about food, such as a midnight feast, a picnic, or enjoying food around a campfire. Ali asked the groups to focus on taste and smell and what they evoked. The results were a gastronomy of descriptions, with beautiful lines like ‘My stomach was growling like a wild dog’ and ‘The cookies were warm in my hand like hope.’

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