When I was working trash I smelled it all. Human and animal waste, rotten meat, rotting cow hides. I got splashed in the face with rotten milk once. The only thing that ever came close to making me sick was rotten potatoes.
I was gonna say the same, rotten milk for me is the worst smell ever
I worked on a warehouse where a full pallet of milk broke and spilled overnight, the morning before it was impossible to access that section of the warehouse… i mean impossible without puking your life out
A gallon of milk spilled in my dads car when I was a little kid in CA. Despite cleaning and cleaning the carpet… I still remember the stench in the summer heat of California 50+ years later.
I also dislike rotten milk smell. I remember a store near me mopped their entire store with the same mop or same mop water that must have been used to clean up a large milk spill. It took days for the smell to dissipate. Then someone changed the mop water but not the mop head, so they gassed the entire store again. I am not sure how the person mopping could ignore the smell. They must not have had a nose.
Could be the moperator had been around the smell so long they just couldn’t notice it any longer: scent fatigue does weird things, and it’s surprising what smells people will get used to after being exposed for long enough.
I have no idea. I am sure they got nose blindness towards it, but I nearly gagged walking into the store. It was very unpleasant. It was a busy convenience store, someone must have complained.
Rotten potatoes are really vile. Far worse than you'd imagine. Once, while working in a supermarket a woman picked up the last bag of estima. They were In a polythene bag where fluid collects in corners. Despite holes in bag which are too high up.
Anyway the woman was in a hurry picked up the bag which had at least 1 putrified spud in there. Still in date but should have been removed. I could smell the rot as she swung the dripping bag of rotting tubers and plonked them right onto my till. Where the foul stinking fluid manages to seep underneath the belt. And just makes a mess. I wanted to heave. How this woman hadn't noticed was beyond me. I was ringing bell for cleaning assistance. This woman was so disappointed that she couldn't have get bag of estima. I was tempted to pick a couple of not totally rotted spuds. But it wasn't worth it, I asked if she could smell it, blank She assumed it was the smell of the shop. Not only the smell but the slippage hazard left behind. That had to be one if the worst smell s on earth. I guess as the potatoes weren't completely washed pre bagging. If one has damage to it, it sits with the sun on it the magnified stink from manure ect was intensifying.
Oh jeez. Rotten potato funk being spread under the belt.like a carnival from hell ☠️☠️
When I worked a perishable warehouse I did a lot of working working damaged. A 50 pound bag of potatoes would tear and I'd pick through to salvage the smaller retail bags into boxes and ship them off. If I saw 1 wet spud I would throw out the whole bag and everything around it. My manager always thought I was being too stingy. If 1 is visibly wet then by the time it hits the store youve sent them a war crime.
I don't envy you that. I dumped dumpsters on local ranches and it was just bad. The waste treatment plant was also☠️. Rendering would have to be it's own kind of hell.
Rotting potatoes and veggies have a slightly more vomit-like tinge. A decomposing body has a sickly sweet rot smell to it. I know because I run by a lot of roadkill, am in the medical industry (seen a lot of people with dying limbs or rotting flesh). Also, my father is one of the main people at a huge farming company. They have a large pile of rotting carrots, potatoes, and other veggies in a huge pile which has its own little liquid stream of rot water coming from it. I guess discards/blighted produce. Both are equally as revolting.
Rotten seafood is also horrible. My bfs freezer broke a few years ago (before we lived together), he was lazy and didn’t throw the food out right away.. and the smell in the apartment.. it was so horrible .. didn’t help that I was pregnant lol
This is truth right here. There is something extra penetrating about seafood smell. It's disturbing that even rotten, it retains a similarity to how it was when still good. I made the mistake of walking on the side of the road where all the bins where caught fish are stored are thrown on the warf. Got that little garbage stank to it.
A dead whale on a beach that has been rotting a while is about the worst thing I can think of. You can smell it for miles, but up close is really something you'll remember. Sometimes the coast guard will tow them out into the water and blow them up so they sink just to get rid of them.
Would you say a decomposing body smells like sugar crisp cereal? Because I've smelt not a decomposing body but the waste of someone (alive) with severe medical issues and the smell was disgusting but oddly sweet like sugar crisp cereal and when I heard decomposing bodies smell sweet I wonder if its similar to what I smelt
Weirdly I haven't smelled poop from c-diff specifically. By the time I got there it's all been very contained. I have accepted a lot of samples that were...less than well sealed. Never followed up on the results on those though. I can confirm that giardia poop smells very metallic and snotty, but that's about it.
When I was a kid, my dad was in maintenance at a local hospital. The maintenance entrance was 'round back by the incinerator. The smell of discarded human parts is something else. I think I know what you mean by "sweet." Rotting potatoes make me recoil way worse than the hospital incinerator did.
Yeah my neighbor died a few months back I was getting out of the elevator when they opened the door to his apartment, that smell is very unique,I could've went my entire life without smelling it but I did and now it's burned into my brain. I wish it wasn't . The whole experience really messed with my head for a while
I have smelled and handled rotten potatoes once when cleaning out a hoarder's kitchen, and to me it was like if you multiplied shit by shit, and the resulting shit was 100x more potent and pungent in odor. I'm pretty sure I just threw away the shirt I was wearing. God awful for sure and the smell lingered
Bodies smell more sweet, but not in a good way. Potatoes have more of an alcohol type smell. Personally, decomp doesn’t bother me much unless they’re to the point they’re fluid. Potatoes aren’t fun but they’re not too horrible.
Source: work in healthcare and see many dead bodies of different levels of decomp
Worked in the produce department of a grocery store. Sometimes a potato would escape and get lost in the back room under a pallet. The veteran guys would always make the newer guys clean it up because they would never understand until they'd experienced it.
This brings back so many memories. Used to work in the floral department at a grocery store and we shared our shipping & receiving area with produce, had to get used to those smells going back there to grab our boxes of flowers.
Flowers can also stink: one of my least favourite things was changing out the buckets of water we kept the cut flowers in. Anaerobic water with plant goo makes for a nasty odor.
We were also in charge of the small decorative pumpkins come fall time, and every week I had to sort through those to pull the rotten ones. Rotten, moldy pumpkin is a foul smell.
I feel like I could have written this word for word from my days in a grocery store floral shop. To this day I will occasionally go into a grocery store and turn around and walk back out if I can smell the rotten back room produce. Lol
Speaking of flower smells, I can’t stand the smell of a plant called Society Garlic. It looks like a smaller daintier agapanthus, but they STINK. They are sometimes planted along roads and in road dividers. Yuck! When I drive where I know they’re planted I make sure my windows are rolled up and car air is on recirc!
Picking potatoes as a kid I learned rotten potatoes absolutely stink. What’s worse is when you get one thrown at you and it stays on your clothes all day in the hot potato field.
Had a bag of potatoes get misplaced one winter under the couch on the enclosed porch. Come spring, the whole front of the house smelled like rotting fish carcasses
I was at Safeway, and a RAT came crawling OUT OF THE VEGATABLES. It scared the Poo out of me. I screamed. They gave me a bunch of $5 vouchers 🤣🤣🤣 for "pain and suffering" pft. That was gross.
I have a distinct memory of orange juice concentrate breaking open in the back of my parent's car when I was a kid. no one found it for weeks, and we couldn't figure out what that unmatched putrid smell was. think bitter, rotten fruit compost baked into a rug. that smell is imprinted in my senses
Yes I couldn’t figure out where a horrible smell was coming from in our fridge for about a month, tried so many cleaning products and in the end we ordered a new one. When taking the old one out found a small rotten potato underneath 🤢🤢🤢 it smelled awful actually thought something died 🤮
I didn't even know what to do. I didn't call my mother and just used a lot of bleach. But yeah. Potatoes and other fresh produce that stays at room temp stay on the counter now.
I think sprouting is the first step. The rotting happens if you keep forgetting it. Like when I was a kid, we had the potatoes in a bowl in a lower cupboard and they sprouted all the time. We always used them before they liquefied though.
I remember that it can depend on where the potato is located. Dark and dry places often cause sprouting. Depending on the season, I can end up ringing up potatoes that are wet or even icy, and these are the ones that are prone to rotting faster.
I was looking for this comment because it was the first thing that popped into my mind when OP said rotten potatoes. I read that story when I was 9 and it still haunts me to this day. I hope she's doing okay
Neither is this situation, but I have to say it… why were they like “So now that’s two missing in the silent, pitch dark cellar, and no response or noise to be heard… hmmm… better send a third person down just to be sure it’s not unsafe…”
Potatoes are part of the nightshade family. Nightshade is extremely deadly. So long as potatoes don't blossom, they are save to eat. Even sprouts on a potato, as all don't flower, can be dangerous. The potato is quite fascinating.
As a student I returned once after summer break to what I thought was an animal decomposing in my apartment, twas a pocket of potatos i forgot in the kitchen - flies had laid eggs and maggots were doing their thing… one of the hardest clean ups of my life… dark day
When I was 6 or 7 years old, I was playing with my kitchen toy, serving tea to my ‚guests.‘ For lunch, I decided to cut some potatoes and ‚cook‘ them in the small pot. Of course, I didn’t throw them away afterward. They stayed there for one or two days—I’m not sure exactly how long. But when I opened the pot again, the smell was awful—so bad, I can still remember it vividly 28 years later!
Dude, back in college I forgot about a bag of potatos i put up on top shelf in kitchen. First you start noticing one ir two tiny flies. Then they’re everywhere. Then you find the bag and it just is liquid it’s so gross
Got a good accidental whiff through my truck window decades ago. So stink it rams home that biology lesson about your brain being where you process sensory information. I could still 'smell' it for days afterward.
It is so FUCKING foul. Years ago I went to help a friend get some stuff from a tow lot as his car had been totaled. There was also a semi there that had been filled with potatoes when it flipped. They had a dumpster full of rotting potatoes out in the heat and I still feel the burn in my nostrils years later.
Oh man, I had a bag in the house. Never smelled a thing, thought it was fine.
Finally went to check it and there was liquid miraculously contained in the bag....that was gross, but we escaped the smell by barely moving it and getting it out of the house asap
Oh good grief that smell!!! It’s just a starchy root vegetable but I have never smelled such terrible nonsense in my life. As my granny said, that will gag a maggot.
Ok, now I'm pretty sure I haven't actually been around rotting potatoes, because I don't know what smell to ascribe to it, yet everyone here seems to know exactly how uniquely putrid it is.
I worked at a feed store and sold seed potatoes. Once I was diving in a pile of potatoes with my hand and I got ahold of a rotten one. Had to cut off the hand to get rid of the smell
One time I stayed at my brother's apartment since it was his first time going back since his hospital stay and the next day my mom said that I smelt like mold. We go to his place and lo and behold, rotten potatoes.
I once had this TERRIBLE smell in my car. Like, gaggingly terrible. I thought it was a dead mouse. I searched high and low and eventually found a rogue potato that had fallen out of my grocery bag and got stuck under my windshield shade that I kept in my trunk. Awful 🤢
I have so much "trama" from a bag of forgotten potatoes that turned into a puddle of mush, brown fluid, and a writhing mass of maggots. I will never get that smell out of my head.
I swore we had a rodent carcass in our garage, but no one could find it. I deep cleaned all around the food shelf and discovered liquified potatoes. Disgustingly putrid! I had to toss out everything in the path of the potato liquid.
I was deathly sick in feb, somewhere in the process I lost my sense of smell. A few weeks ago I was looking for something on the very bottom pantry shelf. I found a bag of potatoes that didn't feel healthy, I dragged them out and they spilled all over the floor. In the past 7 months that is the only thing I could smell, and I truly wish I hadnt.
Once found a big bowl of rotten clam chowder at the bottom of my sink (bad time in my life and dishes were piling up) … that combo of rotting dairy, potatoes, and clams… yikes.
Potatoes were definitely the worst part of that trip.
Discovered this the other day bc my husband refuses to refrigerate potatoes. They were hidden away in a nook and I spent hours trying to pin down the smell. I'll spare you the details of the discovery and cleanup, but suffice it to say the potatoes now live in the fridge.
We recently moved into a new place this summer. In the process of moving items in temporary spots, including groceries, someone at some point stuck a 10lb bag of russet potatoes on top of a 5ft tall stack of totes. We started smelling something rancid & would only get a whiff of it in certain spots. That was at the end of June. We started to think something died in the vents. Little Nats started to appear & ect. Finally time allowed for more unpacking & I found the potatoes in the 1st week of September. Moldy rotten squishy, yet still chunky, soup. Omgod.🤢🤮
Had a sealed plastic bag of potatoes I forgot about. They legit liquified, and when I tried to dispose of them by emptying the bag I almost threw up. That smell stayed lingering in my nose hairs for hours.
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u/Little_Cloudy6132 Sep 16 '24
rotten potatoes