Our need to eat once located us: it told us where we belonged. Now that link is broken, how do we find ourselves in the world? How, in particular, do we find that special place we call ‘home’?

Although taste buds determine the basics of flavour, smell is the sense that delivers it in its full technicolour glory. Before we eat, volatiles (airborne molecules) from food are picked up by olfactory cells at the top of our nose, sending signals to the brain telling it that food is on its way – which is why the mere smell of baking can make us

taking multi-vitamins on top of the average healthy diet is merely buying ‘ingredients for very expensive urine’.

‘delicious’ is just body-speak for ‘thanks, and keep it coming’.

Through this fine-tuning of perceptual skills, meanings immanent in the environment … are not so much constructed, as discovered.’

As the naturalist Edward O. Wilson put it, we’ve got ‘Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology’.

we each possess around 40 million olfactory cells, 50 times fewer than a dog, yet still enough to distinguish between some trillion different smells.

The Finns have a word, sisu, which means strength, grit and tenacity in the face of adversity.

By working out how to feed ourselves, we have found our place in the world.