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? Do some firefighters become vegetarians? Is it something you kinda just get over after a couple times?
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.
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.
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.