I have a shamefully dark question for firefighters. I'm sorry but I'm just too curious to not ask... It's about the smell and how that affects life.

Submitted ⁨⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Aeao@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨nostupidquestions@lemmy.world⁩

How does the smell affect your life, how do you deal with it, do you have any stories.

Im a trivia nerd and sometimes facts connect in an “oh no” kind of way.

Today the fact of “smell is the strongest scent tied to memory and emotions” hit the fact “pigs are very close in alot of ways to human tissue”

That leads to the “oh no”

Its got to be difficult entering after a terrible fire and smelling food, possibly even remember you nyanas famous pulled pork.

Sorry to be gruesome but that’s what I’m asking about.

How do you put that aside? Do you get sick when Nana makes what used to be your childhood favorite?

I couldn’t deal with that, the thought alone shook me. How do firefighters deal with that? Do family members change meal plans if you had a bad situation that day?

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Scranulum@lemm.ee ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Some are affected significantly by it. I would say that in my experience, most aren’t. Most would work a messy suicide with open cranial trauma and then go eat a big plate of spaghetti after turning the scene over to the coroner.

Dead human flesh smells like most raw meat does. Pork isn’t any more similar than beef as far as the aroma is concerned. Rotting human flesh smells pretty similar to most other rotting meats. A lot of times, it smells worse because most people’s experience with rotting meat is a few ounces, maybe a few pounds, that they left in their refrigerator or something of that nature. 200 pounds of it marinatinginside a dank bathroom with poor ventilation, exposed subflooring, and a space heater that’s been running for two weeks is gonna smell a lot worse.

But everyone’s different and has their things. I know a guy who can handle everything except when someone vomits. He will spew every time without question.

The dead people are unfortunately far from the nastiest things you encounter, usually.

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- Suck_on_my_Presence@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Oh. What a… lovely picture you’ve painted.
  
  (It is gross, but I have the absolute utmost respect for the things emt / firefighters / medical peeps put up with. Hats off to you all)
  
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- flandish@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Mine is vomit and sometimes, I guess related, the “coffee grounds” that can appear during CPR of someone having airway/gi troubles. We got rosc on the last guy so, it’s worth it!
  
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  - shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I barfed the coffee grounds in the hospital and they shit bricks. Thought that was only “fresh blood in the stomach” kinda thing?
    
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- RussianBot8453@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Truth. I was an Army Medic and after working on a stomach wound where the patient puked up blood, I went to the dining facility and had cherry pie. Looked exactly the same as the blood puke. Didn’t bother me one bit.
  
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- SomeAmateur@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  This guy knows what he’s talking about
  
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- Aeao@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  That’s the thing tho nasty and gross I could deal with. I’m no hero like emergency services. I grew up on a farm, raised and processed animals here and there. Stumbled apon missing animals that were long past a pleasant smell. I had a grandmother that was a hoarder, I raised 4 kids…
  
  I’m the one in my family that does the “ewww I just can’t… Please I can’t even talking about it *dry heaves”
  
  My family jokes that I would be the guy in the movie doing an autopsy with his sandwich sitting on the chest of the body.
  
  Now none of that was even close to the mental trauma doctors, police, firefighters face. I also know human decomposition is described as much worse. Id also assume smelling the stuff I’ve smelled from animals probably also hits mentally harder coming from a human. I’m not at all saying “meh I’ve smelled it all”
  
  The point I’m making is terrible smells are bad but seeing something awful and smelling a steak or something good? That seems worse. Like if I drained an abscess in an animal and smelled sugar cookies… I wouldn’t be able to eat sugar cookies anymore. I assume. I don’t really know which is why I’m asking.
  
  But I did read you said a person who died by fire doesn’t smell like steak or food? That’s good to hear. Thats what I was unsettled but curious about.
  
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  - milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee ⁨34⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
    I assumed you were also meaning about getting to your nice steak some days later and getting a whiff of memory of the burning-to-death person, and being put off by the trauma from that.
    
    The answers I’ve seen here (really good ones! Thank you guys!) don’t seem to address that directly, but it sounds from them like mostly if you work in that job you learn to push away the horror one way or another and get on with life, and steak-vs-man turns out not so different - even with, as you say, smell being particularly evocative of memories.
    
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  - running_ragged@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I’m not speaking from experience with the firefighters side here, but I do think it come’s down to the ick factor of smell is so much stronger than the yum factor.
    Smell is how we know if something is safe to eat, so if its off even a bit, that jumps to the peak of our attention.
    
    Usually if you burn something a little bit, that’s the only smell you notice.
    
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southsamurai@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
A side note!

If this kind of question isn’t okay in this community, I do keep !morbidquestions@sh.itjust.works around as an alternative to the original reddit sub. So far, nobody here has objected to dark or ugly questions, but just in case

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southsamurai@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Not a firefighter, though I’m related to some and have had discussions about the morbid stuff with them.

From my end of things, I’ve been around burn victims, and close enough to a fire where someone was burned to death to have smelled what you’re asking about.

Like others have said, during a fire, the firefighters are going to be geared up, so they won’t smell it while it’s happening. The lingering smell isn’t as noticeable after because there’s just too many other smells present. That was true for me as a bystander, and my family have said the same.

But I can’t say it smells different in a way that I could sniff it on the wind and automatically know that it was a person, and not someone grilling. I might guess it was pork rather than beef, but I’d say that venison getting over cooked is closer than pork getting over cooked.

It just smells like burning meat. And it wasn’t even that strong at the fire I was present for. I would have guessed it was something in a freezer or fridge at the time.

The remains that time essentially smelled like burnt meat. Damn near all meat smells the same when burnt. Only thing I can think of that stands out is really oily fish. And even that isn’t so different it matters much because the burnt meat smell is still the dominant odor.

Raw human meat smells the same as raw animal meat usually. I’ve been wrist deep in wounds, infected or not, and I’ve processed freshly killed animals. Only time I could tell a difference between mammals is wild vs domesticated. A lot of game animals smell gamy, and domesticated rarely do, and won’t be as strong.

Imo, if you would have a problem with the smell of burnt human being so close to the smell of burnt animal, chances are that the smell of meat cooking would have already bothered you a little. It does bother some people. But I’ve never known anyone that eats meat suddenly give it up after smelling burnt human. I’ve heard of it, but never met anyone that said it.

Now, there’s a pretty damn common reaction to the immediacy of something like that. Like, don’t ask me to eat a rare steak right after I pack a wound, you dig? But a well done burger? Sure. That’s down to individual tolerances though, and mine is more that when I’m packing a wound, it’s usually in bad shape, likely infected or with necrotic tissue.

And the smell of rotting meat, human or not, will put a lot of people off their feed for a while.

So, I’d say that, overall, it’s less about the actual smell and more about how the individual copes with the knowledge that death and horror are everywhere. The more that kind of thing worries you, the more likely you are to see the connection between how much humans are just another kind of meat, and what we eat. The less it worries you, the less repulsion you’ll feel from similar foods.

It’s why, even when I’m trolling vegans, I ain’t mad at being vegan. They just have different set of associations between meat and where it comes from. Can’t be upset about that at all.

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Mothra@mander.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I’m far from being a firefighter and I’ve never encountered a decomposing human body. I just want to point out that the smell of pork most humans like, is the smell of certain pork parts only and under controlled temperatures.

In other words, if you were to throw a pork whole into a fire, the smell would be different from that of ribs on a bbq. You would be burning its fur, skin, internal organs, blood and excrement along with the muscle and fat, and I mean burning, not cooking, which also makes a difference.

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- shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Never thought of all that, assumed we would indeed smell like cooking pork.
  
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flandish@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The victims I have seen directly consumed by fire, I have seen while wearing my scba and have not really smelled them. I’m not on the crews that transport after.

However, when we go to an untimely death or otherwise serious call, there are certainly smells. Nothing having kids hasn’t also sort of exposed you to, though.

Then again, cats, old feces, and other unknown substances and smells from long-passed people does stick around.

You get used to it in an odd way.

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Hideakikarate@sh.itjust.works ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Not a firefighter, but I have smelled human flesh burning. I worked pathology for a year, and right off the O.R., a few times a week, you could smell the cauterized flesh from tonsillectomies. I wasn’t in the room with the procedure, but you could always tell. For me, the smell never really reminded me of pork. It was its own thing. That being said, I can’t speak for everyone, but to me, it didn’t smell like pork.

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- Aeao@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  That is a great answer thank you. That was the most horrific part of the question. I’ve never smelled it obviously but I know pirates called it long pork. I’ve heard it described as tasting like pork but only from people who probably were not cannibals. I don’t talk to a lot of cannibals… That I’m aware of anyway. So I only have what I read here and there in articles. I just assumed if humans tasted like pork then we smell like pork.
  
  So I was talking about smells with a friend “bathrooms and air freshener if you’re curious” and my ADHD brain just linked a bunch of useless trivia.
  
  I’m glad to know humans just smell different. It’s probably biological maybe even evolution. Makes sense because in the cave man days anyone who wasn’t disgusted by another dead human enough to run… Probably didn’t survive as long as those that thought “this is something I want to immediately get away from.”
  
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SomeAmateur@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Personally I get more of a reaction from smelling diesel exhaust and smoke at the same time

I’ve never associated dead people smells with food though.

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- chickenf622@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  OP is secretly a cannibal confirmed.
  
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- Aeao@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  That’s good to know. I told another commenter I’m glad to be wrong. I just assumed it would smell like pork because of all the ways pig is used to test things as replacement for human flesh. Being close here doesn’t mean it’s close there. I just assumed and I’m relieved that’s not something people actually have to deal with.
  
  Still obviously a horrible and traumatic thing to deal with but at least it doesn’t ruin Nana’s famous pulled pork. Which is so small and silly compared to dealing with the horrors of a tragedy but… To use a silly example “it sucks I got fired but it would’ve been slightly worse if I got fired and hit my shin on the table while I was being escorted out of the building”. Basically I’m not implying “well then it’s not so bad” just…One small thing I’m glad isn’t part of the problem.
  
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  - Forester@pawb.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Depends a lot on the circumstances from what I heard from my VFD friends. Apparently it’s very rare to find someone cooked but not charred by the fire and that’s the smell your describing. They all say CSF is the really bad smell that stays with you.
    
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Num10ck@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1BDM1oBRJ8

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