There’s more to wasabi than meets the eye—or rather, more forcefully, the nose. It’s not only an essential in Japanese cuisine, but it may also soon help us devise more effective painkillers, and it’s the secret behind a new kind of fire alarm for the hearing impaired. And by the way, most of us in the United States have never tasted real wasabi. We’ve all been deceived. More on that later.

The wasabi receptor, a complex protein located on the surface of sensory nerve cells, plays a crucial role in pain perception. When an irritating substance—such as wasabi, onion, mustard oil, tear gas, cigarette smoke, or automobile exhaust—comes into contact with the receptor, it prods the cell into sending a distress