A Food Critic Loses Her Sense of Smell

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.

“If you’re not used to it, you don’t know what’s going on,” she said. “It’s almost like wearing a blindfold.”

We follow Tejal on her journey with home remedies and therapies to reclaim her sense. 

Guest: Tejal Rao, a California restaurant critic and columnist for The New York Times.

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Background reading: 

• Regaining a sense of smell is tedious and slow, but Tejal is using the only therapy proven to work.
• Listen to our Sunday Read about how the coronavirus could precipitate a global understanding of the sense of smell, which has long been disregarded as the least important sense.

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

 Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.