This turned into a huge post about not being able to smell, so everyone can feel free to skip it - it has very little interest or relevance to anyone but me, I don't think!
Anosmia
Yes, I get very paranoid about smelling & not knowing, but my family & DH are under strict instruction to just tell me (discreetly!). I'm also fairly aware of when I'm likely to smell these days, so just pre-empt it. Now I only live with DH, I never wear a top more than once without washing it no matter how long it's been on, for example. I'm generally not a very smelly person (I always got my sister to smell every item of clothing when I lived with her, to save the masses of washing that I now have - & most of it was clean for at least a couple of wears) but I think that pregnancy has made me more smelly. I make sure that I shower every day & wash my armpits 2 or 3 times a day, just in case. I'm lucky in that I know that I don't have smelly feet, so I don't worry about taking my shoes off.
There have been a few times, actually, when I've been out in ballet pumps or whatever & it's rained. The water I've walked through in the streets has dried in my shoes & been really smelly & I've not known about that until it was too late, which is embarrassing because people must think that it's my feet
But yeah, I'm super-conscious of my hygiene because I have no idea how smelly I am, or otherwise. Same goes for brushing my teeth - although I can often feel that my mouth isn't very clean, I brush my teeth at least 3 times a day, just in case. I'm not a person with generally OCD tendencies, it is just that I don't want to become a social leper without my knowledge
The food thing is complicated, but the simple answer is no. The middle-ground answer is that it's most similar (in the experience range of a 'normal' person) to when you have an awful cold & your nose is totally blocked up & food tastes funny as a result. I've heard from a few sources that the percentage of taste that is independent of smell is 25% - I effectively only have 3.25 senses There is also the thing that you can do, which you're probably aware of, where you eat something relatively plain (a slice of apple or banana, for example) & sniff an orange (or similar - something quite strong & distinctive) at the same time. What you're eating will taste like the orange.
There are other issues, too - I have no 'grey areas' of taste. It's difficult for me to articulate what that means, because it's like a blind person describing colour, but it's a case of everything being split up into the categories of taste (sweet, sour, bitter, salty & 'umami' as it's called, I think [savoury]) with no overlap between them. So if you dissolved sugar into vinegar & I drank it, I'd pretty much just be able to taste sugar & vinegar, not really a mixture of the two. Not that that concoction would be particularly delicious to anyone, but I'd find it especially unpleasant because it's confusing as well as obviously strange! For that reason I refuse to eat anything that's sweet & sour, or any fruit & meat combinations, etc. The thought of pineapple on pizza makes me gag, that sort of thing.
Then there's the spicy issue - I find it very difficult to eat spicy food because it doesn't taste of anything to me. It just feels like burning. I can eat chicken tikka masala (pretty much the only Indian thing I will eat!) because it has other flavours beyond the spice and it's not too hot. It is a very unpleasant sensation for me to eat very spicy food because of the anosmia.
Texture's massively important to me because of all of those things. I'm not quite so bad as I used to be, but I still find it difficult to have multiple types of food in my mouth at once. I eat all of my food one 'type' at a time - so with a Sunday dinner, I'd eat the carrots, then the broccoli, & so on, until I got to the meat, which I'd eat last. There would be no cross-over As I say, I'm not quite so obsessed with that as I was as a child (for years I could only eat from a plate with partitions, so the food couldn't touch each other), but I still don't like it very much & don't tend to like any form of sauces or anything on my food. Like if I have a pie, the pie has to be well away from everything else in case it leaks
The main texture issue as a kid was that everything was 'slimy' & all tasted the same. Cooked mushrooms & onions were the worst culprits, although oddly mushrooms are one of my favourite things now. I tend to like very plain foods (I'm a total carb fiend for that reason) because they don't make my head explode with conflicting aspects of taste.
I was a vegetarian for about 12 years, from age 7 until recently. My family (apart from my dad) still think that I am but it just drove me absolutely insane because nearly all veggie substitutes for food feel the same, but are flavoured to replicate the meat they're meant to replace. After 12 years of pretty much the same meal every day, I finally broke down & returned to The Dark Side