Now I use fish sauce on occasion. It’s stinky stuff for sure, but I buy it in a nice, sealed bottle that I can recap after use.
But I got to thinking about what a revolting environment it must be on the factory floor…that stench must live with you forever, and ditto if you have the misfortune to live nearby. :eek:
What would be your idea of the Worst Factory Job ever?
Rendering plant.
Once had to deliver water to the (now closed) local plant in the middle of a heat wave.(103F that day)
Ever seen a man-high pile of cow heads?
Pig manure spreader. Cow and horse manure have nothing on pig shit, and spreading fermenting shit slurry on farm land can be smelled for miles. I can only imagine what it smells like at ground zero.
Knew I shouldn’t have posted the OP just before breakfast.
We really need the barfy smilie back.
Horseradish production.
Look it up, YIPES!
Talk about your VOC !
I hear paper mills are pretty bad.
I used to live a couple of hundred metres from a paper mill, and while the smell was definitely unpleasant, it wouldn’t rank anywhere near the worst IMHO.
Oh yeah. Many years ago travelling through rural England in a hire car, suddenly drove into a miasma of what can only be described as OMGWHATTHEFUCKWASTHAT?? Windows were wound up damned fast, and we hot-footed it out of there as quickly as we could.
Horrible, horrible stench. Cow and horse shit are sheer ambrosia.
I remember visiting a friend, many years ago, who lived in Grove City, OH, and there was a sewage-treatment plant in the town. Just driving into town was enough to make me lose my lunch. My friend joked about the smell, but said after awhile it would be barely noticeable-and he was right. Thank Og for over-sensitized olfactory nerves(I’m assuming?) Driving OUT of that poor, benighted place brought back the overwhelming odor once again. His real sorrow was actually moving away because the family would have to leave just about everything behind, since there was no way the stench could ever be eradicated from furniture, clothing and personal belongings. I wonder if that place still exists?
We need a “holding your nose” emoticon. :o
I grew up on a horse farm with our neighbor a pig farm. We could always tell when the wind was coming from their direction.
Spreading it on the fields wasn’t so bad; that was mostly done in the winter, and the temperature reduced the smell quickly.
It’s a city of 36,000. That plant must have been something else if you could smell it throughout the town.
I used to live in Sacramento, and the Campbell’s Soup factory was unspeakably awful at tomato harvest time. You may (or may not) eat tomato soup year-round, but the tomato harvest only lasts a week or two, so it’s a frenzied race against time to turn those tomatoes into soup before they spoil. The farms would overfill the trucks to ensure they arrive full, but that meant certain curves and ramps on the freeway would be bright red with spilled and smashed tomatoes.
The combined stink of spilled and rotting tomatoes, the industrial-scale cooking of them and then the leftovers (seeds, stems, etc) rotting in mounds out back before they can be hauled off was nauseating.
How about living in an area with a ketchup factory? In this case, if those solid Roma tomatoes fell off the truck, they simply bounced and rolled off instead of splattering. And then the town would smell like ketchup. :o
One of the farms local to me spread some pig manure about a month ago. I returned home and was nearly knocked over by the smell when I got out of my car. There had been some washing left out to dry for a couple of hours that afternoon, which needed to be re-washed twice, as it had become infused with the smell.
I remember reading a story a couple of years back about the residents living near a Sriracha manufacturing plant. They claimed the couldn’t go outside with out their eyes stinging. Can only imagine how bad it must have been in the plant itself.
As a 16 year old I worked in a small town butcher and baker. I helped out in the slaughterhouse and was no stranger to carrying severed cows heads (they are disturbingly heavy), cleaning stomachs with a brush and hosepipe ready for tripes, cutting out and skinning tongues and manhandling large dumpsters full of entrails for the rendering lorry to tip out and carry away.
Sounds hideous but it was actually an excellent and very well run establishment and a great introduction to the realities of nose-to-tail butchering.
As for Fish Sauce, I like it too and I love the fact that the recipe appears to be
In my case, any which involves “height jobs in a harness”. Can’t stand the harness.
And in general, those where you have to dress up in an asbestos-and-aluminum astronaut suit and stop every 15’ to drink some water, well, those are places where there needs to be something else going for the job: reasonable bosses, good benefits, or simply a lack of other jobs in the area. A guy who had a job like that in a place with lousy weather once told me “hey, at least when it’s freezing out here we can’t say we’re not warm in there :D”
Driving from Pittsburgh to Ocean City, Maryland I remember traffic slowdowns in a town that had a poultry processing plant. The aroma was not good, and there was residential housing nearby.
ETA: there was a cat hoarder in nearby Kittanning. Her neighbor’s had to leave their porches and go inside when the wind shifted. She had a small kitchen fire. The newspaper write up had an interview with the volunteer fire chief who mentioned that the fire was small and put out easily, but that respirators were needed to deal with the stench.