Until March, when everything started tasting like cardboard, Katherine Hansen had such a keen sense of smell that she could recreate almost any restaurant dish at home without the recipe, just by recalling the scents and flavors.
Then the coronavirus arrived. One of Hansen’s first symptoms was a loss of smell, and then of taste. Hansen still cannot taste food, and says she can’t even tolerate chewing it. Now she lives mostly on soups and shakes.
"I’m like someone who loses their eyesight as an adult,” said Hansen, a real estate agent who lives outside Seattle. "They know what something should look like. I know what it should taste like, but I can’t get there.”