This isn’t really relevant to your question at all, but you reminded me of a (male) friend who is a gynecologist and married to a woman. I expected that the professional context would nullify any potential arousal towards his patients, but what I was curious about was whether this might bleed over into his personal life — i.e. did he still find his partner’s vulva arousing, or does it put him into doctor-headspace. Apparently his profession causes no problems whatsoever in his sex life, because the compartmentalisation is so strong.

He said that it feels almost like conceptual homonyms. For example, in the sentence “up past the river bank is the bank where I deposited my money”, the word “bank” appears twice but means two very different things. Similarly, a vulva is a vulva no matter the context, but the meaning of it differs so much depending on the context that his brain literally doesn’t parse them as being the same.

Like I say, it’s not related to your question, but I thought you might find it cool nonetheless. I would expect that firefighters would show a similar ability to compartmentalise, but perhaps the high-stress context of smelling human flesh may cause it to work differently.

the smell from blood serum, is a very unusual smell, if you had atopic dermatitis cause weeping rash, the weeping is a very unusual smell you cant pinpoint. its the sometimes yellowish and clear fluid that seeps out of wounds and weeping rashes.

If you’re worried about how smells affect you, have you ever smelt where a person died? It smells almost exactly like a bunch of very very rotten food. But your mind freaks out about it knowing it comes from a person. I used to work on insurance jobs and have cleaned up after 3 deaths and the smell… it just fucking sticks in your mind knowing what it is. Once a car was brought into the warehouse after a suicide but i didnt know what for it just smelt like a fridge of food after not having power for a month. But as soon as i learned what it was my brain instantly made it smell worse. Honestly kinda crazy.

My firefighter days were long ago and short numbered but I am a paramedic.

Truth to be told: I have PTBS from the smell of burning human meat. I had two cases that cemented that in my brain - both were not people burning to crisp but instead people who were still moving* - but beyond rescue. In that state human meat smells different from other meats and it is… something you don’t want to smell ever.

(*: Even most severely burnt people, with 99% grade 3 burns are awake for quite a while. They are beyond resuce,though. Please people, don’t try to kill yourself with fire. And if you do, don’t do it in front of people. Really don’t. You fuck them up for life)

I still cannot stand if my wife cleans the oven for example.

Not a firefighter, but a welder. I’ve smelled burned me on more than one occasion, and it wasn’t really “horrific” as much as “oh, so that’s what that smells like.” Could be that smelling my own burnt flesh rather than someone else’s made a difference, and that the vast majority of mine were just surface burns, but still. Just smells like burned pork.

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 marinating inside 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. Some people can’t handle feces well. Some people can’t handle mucus plugs from a tracheostomy tube that hasn’t been suctioned in far too long. Some people can’t handle bile mixed with chicken noodle soup that fountains out of a cardiac arrest on the first chest compression. Some people really do perceive burning human flesh as having its own distinct and repulsive smell. A lot of people would say that, actually. To me, it just smelled like burnt meat.

The rotting flesh or dead flesh itself is unfortunately far from the nastiest thing you encounter, usually.

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.

I don’t know how firefighters prevent the PTSD.

24 years ago I regularly passed through the disaster site in NYC, and the smells linger in my brain even now.

My grandad went to Normandy , my dad was a firefighter, and I’m glad I’m just a computer nerd. The most stressful thing I should have to do is make sense of all the broken things RedHat jammed together and sold as a product.

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

I’ve been to the Ganges in India and thought burning human smelled more like lamb/mutton/goat than pork.

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.

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.

you need to be careful with your assumptions. Just because it looks like facts can connect and lead to natural conclusions does not mean they do.

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.

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.