It’s teenagers who enjoy it the most. It’s there in so many of the snacks they eat. It is a horrifying rottenness. They love it. They are wrong to love it.

Of course, many of these snacks of rottenness contain chilli; that fresh adventure for the young person. With alcohol, even coffee, still far on the horizon, the enjoyment of chilli carries an illicit charge and bragging rights.

And, of course, these snacks are heavily freighted with umami, the protein decoy. While adults somehow remain wary of this big-FMCG alchemy, the industrial transformation of cheap carbs and cardboard seems to be irresistible to the pubertal.   

But umami itself, sometimes called the “meaty” or “brothy” taste, is merely taste; it doesn’t itself have an odour. Try poking your nose around a jar of MSG; there’s nothing there. 

These snacks, on the other hand, are highly pungent. As well as the chilli powder and the gourmet powder, there are other powders in play. And, again, it’s “meaty”. Whether the snack contains a morsel of meat or just a soggy strip of styrofoam, this is a meaty whiff; an unfresh whiff.

At the root of this is what I call “hospital smell”. There’s a hint of incontinence to this bouquet, but mostly just the smell of people sleeping and eating in one place; one over-heated narrow little place. Hospital food, like aeroplane food, favours minced and stewed meats over fresh ones. Presumably, highly-processed meat is easier to cut and chew, as well as cheaper.

A pure form of this smell afflicts my classroom at 10:30am, when students share a bag of “beef” potato chips. And it’s a variation on this smell that wafts from their spicy snacks; again meaty but this time tinged with fermentation. This is the smell in many hot-pot sauces; it’s there in the soy-based thick sauces such as yellow-bean [黄酱], sweet been [甜面酱], etc. I recently bought some bamboo shoots steeped in it.

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However, in these spicy snacks, it’s turned up to 11. This frankenfunk can stink out any room. And teenagers are not just using this as adult bane; they enjoy it. “Try one, teacher”, they say. No thanks.   

My big daughter loves to suck small red fish out of a foil-wrap sachet. This, her favourite snack, smells to me not so much of chilli pepper as rotting carrot. 

A quick look online suggests that some of the candidate substances have names like brevibacterium, putrescine and cadaverine. I’ll need to research this more deeply one day.  

In the meantime, I’m smelling these meaty, rotten odours in my own sweaty clothes and in my shoes. Yes, I’m paranoid. And I’m smelling this sometimes in my tea. It’s green tea that is most affected; many of my recent biluochuns [碧螺春] and mao fengs [黄山毛峰] exhibiting this aroma. 

So it is with some relief that I enjoy this green tea currently on my desk. Its mouth-filling umami tastes like the antidote to taste trickery and teenage folly. Fresh green peas are the parallels here. This aroma has nothing of the hot-pot gutter, the hospital or the human slipstream.

This pronounced absence, this pleasing purity, assures me that my paranoia is not quite complete. A gift from a colleague, it hails from a family tea farm in Anhui. This drink never fails to please me. How wonderful to be a grown-up, I sigh. 

Or maybe this just reveals me as one rotten old fart.