Fun Factoid!

Altitude and humidity highly affect the way food taste's!

Humidity could be a given in the sense of how it affects the freshness and lusciousness of food, but that is not the case here. Taste bud's are the victim here and in my case the benefactor. Calgary sits at an altitude of 1049 meters with a relative humidity of ___ and Melbourne at a delightful 18.

When people generally think of bad food and high altitude they think of airplane food, but alas they are not to blame. Well not entirely, the food is still bad on a plane, but you can't actually expect gourmet cuisine when it cost a gazillion dollars alone to get the plane of the landing strip. Back to the point, higher altitudes have a lower circulation of air. We all know what dry air does to the human body; cracking skin and harsh breathing conditions:

Low-humidity environment dries out the nasal passage and significantly reduces the power of your taste buds.
Blame these tiny taste receptors and their dependence on your sense of smell, coupled with the depletion of saliva for the lack of wow factor in high-altitude food. “What most people consider taste is really more flavor, of which the vast majority is really from olfaction—or the sense of smell," says Doctor Gene Liu, an Otolaryngologist at Cedars Sinai Medical Group. "Our taste buds are little chemical receptors in the mouth and throat and predominantly on the tongue that sense sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami when partially broken down foods within the saliva come into contact with the receptor cells. An electrical signal is then transmitted to the taste centers within the brain along specialized nerves."

The Science of Taste Buds

In simple english; living somewhere with relatively high humidy will mean the food will taste better!