His first book, On Food and Cooking, became a kitchen and classroom classic after its debut in 1984, and was dubbed a “minor masterpiece” by Time magazine for building a revolutionary bridge between the technical science of food and the joyful habits of cooking.
 
McGee intended to follow up the second 2004 edition of On Food and Cooking with a similarly food-focused guide to flavor, but as he began his research, he became intrigued with how food aromas echo smells in the rest of the world.
 
“I thought I was going to write about food and drink” he says. “I already knew them pretty well. But then to learn about perfume, and astrochemistry, and confined animal feeding operations… I didn’t know anything about that stuff, so I had to really learn from the ground up in a bunch of fields that were new to me, which was both the challenge but also the fun.”
 
Nose Dive offers readers a guide to the smells of the universe, beginning with the Big Bang, and reveals one of McGee’s personal rules to remember: from food to environment, always stop and enjoy the simple scents of everyday.
 
“Each place has its own flavor, and the flavor of the world isn’t restricted to food. It’s all around you all the time,” he says, “as you’re walking down the street and you get a whiff of a tree, or somebody cooking, or the exhaust from a clothes dryer. There’s a lot going on around us all the time, and it can be fun to pay attention to it every once in a while and realize what it’s coming from.”

Order your copy of Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World's Smells today.