Right now, my kitchen is suffused with that vivid fragrance familiar to suburban homeowners everywhere, and to any apartment dwellers who have ever played inadvertent hosts to rodents — the smell of an animal corpse busily decomposing somewhere out of reach.

Judging by the strength and approximate location of the odor, I would say the deceased is under the porch and smaller than the neighbor’s cat that once decided to expire there. But I can also attest that I will not be the one to narrow matters of taxonomy and position any further.

Besides, when I step outdoors, I almost choke on the similarly sickly sweet aroma of weekend gardeners slathering their backyard plots with what seems like enough fertilizer for Nebraska, Iowa and the San Joaquin Valley combined.

It’s everywhere in the air, all right, including as the metaphoric whiff of an ongoing global scandal, the spiking of pet food, and our food, with particles of a potentially toxic industrial chemical called melamine.