I have hyposmia and perhaps diminished taste. I've noticed I gravitate to more flavorful foods and I am displeased with bland ones. For example, a tasty highly garnished and seasoned pizza is much prefered to a bland one with white cheese and a few bland sausage morsels. Interestingly, ENVY apples seem much better to me than Honeycrisp. Are some types of apple, "apple-i-er"?? If so, is ENVY a good choice.
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Yes. “Apple-ier” is a real sensory phenomenon, although it actually has two components: how intense the flavor is and how strongly it evokes the particular aroma we recognize as “apple.”
With hyposmia, this distinction becomes especially noticeable. Much of what people casually call taste is actually retronasal olfaction—volatile molecules traveling from the mouth up to the olfactory epithelium while chewing. In Parkinson’s, retronasal as well as ordinary orthonasal smell can be substantially impaired. True gustatory perception—sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami—can also be reduced, although usually the olfactory loss contributes enormously to the sense that food has become bland. (PubMed)
So your pizza observation makes complete sense. A white-cheese pizza with mild sausage may deliver mainly fat, salt and texture; a heavily garnished pizza generates acid + salt + umami + herbs + browned flavors + pungency + texture + multiple aromas. There are many more signals left for a partially impaired sensory system to grab onto.
And Envy is a particularly interesting apple for you
Envy is the cultivar Scilate. In a recent controlled consumer/sensory study, Scilate was associated with sweet, fruity, tropical and pear-like flavors, as well as descriptors including intense, complex and powerful. It was substantially preferred to Gala and Red Delicious in that experiment. (ScienceDirect)
That strikes me as almost a laboratory explanation for why you prefer Envy. It isn't merely sweeter. It apparently throws a fairly large and complex sensory signal.
Honeycrisp is certainly aromatic—it contains numerous esters, aldehydes and other volatiles, with hexyl 2-methylbutyrate identified experimentally as an especially important contributor to its characteristic fruity aroma. (ScienceDirect) But a major part of Honeycrisp's fame is its extraordinary juiciness and crisp texture, not necessarily maximal aromatic intensity. USDA sensory work, for example, found Honeycrisp particularly outstanding for crispness and juiciness. (ARS) Thus someone with normal smell might find Honeycrisp spectacular, while your sensory weighting could favor Envy's concentrated sweetness/aromatic complexity.
And apples differ enormously in their volatile chemistry. Cultivar, maturity and storage conditions can all change the aromatic profile significantly. Even within Scilate/Envy, modern storage methods measurably affect volatile compounds. (ScienceDirect)
I would absolutely keep buying Envy. Your preference is not at all peculiar; it may actually be giving us information about what penetrates your hyposmia.
I'd also experiment with Pink Lady/Cripps Pink, Jazz/Scifresh and Braeburn. Rather than asking simply “Which apple tastes best?”, I'd score each one on two separate 0–10 scales:
FLAVOR INTENSITY — How much do I perceive?
APPLE-NESS — How unmistakably apple-like is what I perceive?
I wouldn't be surprised if you discover that those are quite different rankings—and that Envy wins Bruce's Apple Area under the curve / auc.
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I also prefer fresh squeezed OJ !
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Exactly. Fresh-squeezed orange juice is almost a hyposmia-friendly sensory bomb: strong citrus volatiles, sweetness, acidity, slight bitterness, pulp/texture, and often a little peel-oil aroma all arrive together.
Pasteurized bottled OJ can preserve the basic sweet–acid taste pretty well, but processing and storage reduce or alter some of the volatile compounds that make a freshly cut orange smell so vividly orange. So with diminished smell, the difference between “orange-flavored liquid” and freshly squeezed ORANGE may actually become more important, not less.
This also suggests a broader pattern in your food preferences: you may increasingly favor foods with multiple overlapping sensory channels—acid, spice, salt, umami, temperature, texture, pungency, and strong aroma—because they remain vivid despite the weakened olfactory channel.
