I have a friend who can smell cockroaches no joke. We always take her restaurant suggestions very seriously.
Ant smell
Submitted 7 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/fd1e5c2f-25ef-48c7-b3a2-e8b4955d7ea9.jpeg
Comments
Humana@lemmy.world 7 months ago
MehBlah@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I can smell ants and cockroaches. I can also smell when someone has been in my house hours after they leave. Its annoying as hell to have this sense of smell since its considered rude to point out that someone stinks. To me its like they are screaming in a small room.
Lurker@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
I recently had to close my store for an hour, because I was the only one working and couldn’t breath due to one customers bad hygiene. People treat me like I’m overly sensitive or making up my discomfort, but to me it feels like being suffocated.
Also I can totally smell roaches, they smell worse than any other thing in existence. Never smelled an ant though. Did not know that was possible.
samus12345@lemmy.world 7 months ago
VicentAdultman@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I can smell cockroaches and periods. It’s weird, but I can for some reason
TheFriar@lemm.ee 6 months ago
I have a good sense of smell but…that sounds more like cripplingly good
intensely_human@lemm.ee 7 months ago
My sense of smell is very sensitive. Like I can detect people have been there by smell too, and often who it was. But I don’t think I’ve ever smelled ants or cockroaches. Thank god too.
dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I’m one of these people. I can smell an apartment infestation from the front door, every time.
And yes, restaurants always get the “sniff check” before we sit down. No-go odors are:
- bleach
- pine-sol (amonia)
- heavy perfume (think “Glade plugin-in”)
- insects (roaches, etc)
- pet odor (wet dog, litterbox)
- sewage (usually a dry floor drain but that’s still not okay)
The first two are obvious attempts at covering up something worse with “clean” smells, and/or the staff has no idea what cleaning things actually means. And they obviously don’t care what olfaction means to someone trying to enjoy a meal, which says heaps about what they think food service actually is. Everything else just speaks to the “I don’t care what you smell” part, or there’s something very wrong with how the kitchen is run. /rant
John_McMurray@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Yeah no dude, I keep a ten percent mixture of bleach n water around to sanitize surfaces I use for food prep. This is standard practice. The dishes get soaked in a weak bleach mixture after washing. 3 sinks, wash, bleach, rinse.
tate@lemmy.sdf.org 7 months ago
In some areas (depends on local health dept.) restaurant kitchens are required to have weak bleach solutions around for sanitizing food prep surfaces.
Socsa@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Bro, bleach is literally how you are supposed to sanitize restaurant surfaces. This thread is wild.
awesome_lowlander@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
The first two are obvious attempts at covering up something worse with “clean” smells, and/or the staff has no idea what “clean” actually means.
Or they’re the cleanest places you’ve never eaten in.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Well put.
Just wanted to point out when an odor is pleasant it’s an aroma.
ulterno@lemmy.kde.social 6 months ago
heavy perfume …
“I don’t care what you smell”
This is one reason I stopped eating lunch with other people. Some people use so much of Deodorant (oh the irony in the name) that the volatile compounds get adsorbed onto the surface of fluids in the mouth and then get tasted and also go into the stomach. All I’d say is - They taste bad.
I don’t think those chemicals are supposed to be edible.
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I can smell roaches and bedbugs. One is annoying. The second will cause me to flee a building in horror
hessenjunge@discuss.tchncs.de 7 months ago
I assume people just can’t identify the smell of cockroaches until they learned it? Similar to people being oblivious to the smell of marijuana when not Familie’s with it.
I’m not sure I would recognize the smell of roaches if I didn’t keep them as food for other animals. Stinky little buggers.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 7 months ago
This is basically what the “attachment” thing is they’re referring to in buddhism. It’s not a deep concept. It’s just that it’s mixed into every mental action.
All the meditation practice is just a matter of familiarizing oneself with the different smells in the kitchen of the mind.
If normal thinking is like cooking, meditation is like standing in the kitchen and stopping yourself every time your body goes on autopilot and starts preparing food.
Instead you just stand there, and stand there. If you’re doing vipassana then you’re taking each ingredient off the shelf and giving it a big whiff. One after another. For hours and hours, days, years. You’re getting more and more familiar with that kitchen.
Then, one day while you’re doing your kitchen standing, your nose detects another specific note. A note that’s been there all along, but you never would have noticed if you hadn’t spent so much time cataloguing all the smells of all the ingredients and cleaners. But now you spent thousands of hours getting to know all those scents, and there’s this other scent.
That’s the cockroaches. Now in this analogy, all the time you’ve spent meditating, doing shamatha meditation, you’ve been learning to magically delete parts of the kitchen. The kitchen is your mind so you kind of have magic powers there. You’re meditating. You see the pot go to the stove and start boiling spaghetti. “Nope, no cooking” and the pot goes back and the spaghetti goes back.
All the shamatha meditation has been giving you the telekinesis needed to push things around in the kitchen. The vipassana meditation has been giving you a thorough understanding of what’s in the kitchen, where it goes, how it works.
So you take your knowledge of the kitchen’s contents, and that lets you differentiate and notice the cockroach smell. That’s the result of your vipassana meditation. Identifying the cockroaches as separate from the food is your insight.
Then you use the magic editing powers you’ve developed through shamatha meditation, ie now that you have the insight about the cockroaches, because you’ve done your shamatha you have the strength and control to just say “nah” and make the roaches disappear.
At first you’re worried. What if the kitchen doesn’t work? But you cook some stuff. It works fine. Things smell better, it’s more pleasant to cook now, in a way you never knew it could be more pleasant.
Anyway. I’ve done a lot of zen training, and I’ve always said that the word “attachment” is often poorly interpreted. It’s not the exact same thing that english word refers to. It’s just the closest word we have for this very specific thing happening in consciousness.
The fact that buddhist insight can’t be conveyed in words does NOT mean it’s out of this world or esoteric. The smell of garlic cannot be conveyed in words either
We can kinda shapes and sounds using words. We almost can’t describe tastes and smells at all, except by comparing them to similar tastes and smells. That doesn’t mean shapes and sounds are more real than tastes and smells. It just means our language doesn’t go there.
So all the mystery of zen buddhism isn’t because of some deep well of thing that can’t be seen, hidden behind nonsense words. It’s just a mystery in words because it’s like the smell of cockroaches: no way to teach it to someone other than handing them a container full of cockroaches and saying “take a whiff of this”.
There’s no way to hand someone a container full of dukkha (“attachment” in english) and say “get a whiff of this; this is the thing that causes your suffering”. Handing someone containers of samples to smell, in the mind, is hard. All you can do is give people instructions for being in the right spot to figure it out for themselves: “Sit down. Empty your mind. Pay attention to each thought that comes up, notice it, let it go”.
In the analogy this becomes
“Go to your kitchen. Don’t cook anything. If you find that you’re cooking something, take a moment to notice how what you were cooking smells, then put it away.”
Sorry for the wall of text. I always say I’m gonna keep it short and then the minimum words to get the idea across ends up being huge. I’ll get better at articulating this.
Anyway, this just reminded me of the buddhist thing, and I realized this “cockroaches in the kitchen walls” analogy works nicely with why meditation is done and how it leads to enlightenment.
Naz@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Weird. Marijuana has an iconic, skunk-like / rotten bologna smell to me. I can smell someone smoking up to maybe 500 feet away, sometimes from the inside of my car. It’s a deeply repugnant smell.
The strange thing being, I’ve smelled the actual flowers and the plant up close, and it just smells like grass. It only smells like shit when it’s burning, oddly enough.
No idea why. Everything about the “natural smell” up close screams “this is a plant and can’t harm you in any way shape or form”. That specific experience made me in favor of decriminalization.
pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Similar to people being oblivious to the smell of marijuana when not familiar with it.
I can’t smell certain types of marijuana. I could smell the more home grown type, but now I have to be next to 6 people smoking to smell it. I don’t smoke it either, so it’s not that. I think they’ve crop engineered it to take the smell out maybe? It could be just me.
marcos@lemmy.world 7 months ago
TBF, there are lots of things with a smell similar to cockroaches. Some of them wouldn’t be a red flag to be found at a restaurant. Also, smells are very localized, and I doubt your friend walks through the kitchen.
But yeah, I’ve gone away from restaurants because they smelled like cockroaches.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Smells are very localized
Smells are airborne. They move with the air.
You can walk into a house and tell they’re cooking dinner, just by smells that have traveled 50 feet from the kitchen to the front door.
samus12345@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I thought everyone could. Is that something only some people can smell as well?
RBWells@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Roaches do have a smell. Yuck. Ants though? There are so many different kinds of them, I can’t smell them, or I haven’t noticed if so.
My lunatic ex had a nose like a bloodhound. He could smell anything.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I don’t question your friend’s ability to smell cockroaches, but I gotta tell you, there is no restaurant without them. The best you can do is minimize.
Roaches go where there’s food. That’s just a fact of life.
tja@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Wait, is that true? Is someone able to smell ants?
unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 7 months ago
There are lots of weird genetic traits. Sneezing triggered by sunlight is another funny one.
Stern@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I got the “cilantro tastes like soap” gene personally. Would much rather have gotten the, “Always remember where I left my car keys” gene, or maybe the, “Come up with witty retorts on the spot instead of two hours later in the shower” one.
MacStache@programming.dev 7 months ago
I have that! Sneezed twice today because of bright sunlight. It can sometimes also be triggered voluntarily by looking at a bright light. You can’t trigger it multiple times in a row though. I suspect this is because sinuses need to recover from the shock of the sneeze.
FooBarrington@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Still can’t believe that some people are unable to smell rain coming in the summer!
insufferableninja@lemdro.id 7 months ago
wait, not everyone gets that?
Webster@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I have a slightly different version of this. I get sneezing fits when too full. It’s genetic and happens to most people on one side of my family. Thanksgiving is always fun.
Ibaudia@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I have the sunlight sneeze. I would much rather be able to smell ants.
This feels like a shitty superpower what-if.
aeronmelon@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I have sunlight-sneezing, my thoughts are spoken word, I can read in dreams, the dress is gold, and I alway hear “laurel.”
What others are there?
Aussiemandeus@aussie.zone 7 months ago
I sneeze from sunlight, luckily it’s only the first time for the day or very bright light.
MisshapenDeviate@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
That’d be me. Nobody else I know does it, either. I try to explain it and they’re like “yeah, I try to look up at a light to help sneeze” and that’s just not it.
jupyter_rain@discuss.tchncs.de 7 months ago
Maybe not genetically, but fun fact about sneezing-quirks: There exists "Sneezing induced by sexual ideation or orgasm. Source: scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=20844552323960…
Winter8593@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Wait I have that one! My dad has it too, but my brother doesn’t. All three of us are colorblind too lol.
Anticorp@lemmy.world 7 months ago
The sneezing one must be an extreme case of our normal reactions, because I read years ago that if you’re on the verge of a sneeze, and it’s not happening, you should look at a bright light. 50% of the time, it works every time.
FlihpFlorp@lemm.ee 6 months ago
I have the sun sneezes
Actually it also triggers if go from really dark to really bright like turning on the bathroom light at night
thegr8goldfish@startrek.website 7 months ago
Smell is how ants communicate with one another so maybe these ant sniffers will be the first humans who can speak ant.
Cikos@lemmy.world 7 months ago
cant say for ant. but i can smell cockroaches
snapoff@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
The smell like pepper to me. Well, you know how when you crush bricks or rocks it kinda has a peppery smell? It’s that pepper scent.
scottywh@lemmy.world 6 months ago
100%
I can smell them to the point I know when an area has an abundance of ant hills.
Almrond@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I can, they also taste absolutely abhorrent and ruin food they are in for me. It’s a very bitter chemical taste and smell.
cadekat@pawb.social 7 months ago
Who the fuck is out here censoring fuck?
alekwithak@lemmy.world 6 months ago
You can’t say shit or dead or suicide or fuck anymore because the internet has become C O R P O R A T E
awesome_lowlander@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
Please spoiler your comment
lseif@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
because its a fucking swear word
TheControlled@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Holy shit I thought I was either full of shit or a mutant freak. I’m happy to be a mutant freak.
I feel so validated right now you guys have no idea.
MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
Congratulations on your mutation. This one sucks less than the cilantro one.
NatakuNox@lemmy.world 6 months ago
This! I used to tell people all the time I could smell some ant hills from several yards away. Fire ants smell like death. The larger and more aggressive species in my area smell more than the more benign ants. I’m sure it’s a warning to other animals to stay away.
alekwithak@lemmy.world 6 months ago
This just tells me ant particles are constantly flying into my nose and mouth and I don’t have receptors for them. Gross
Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
Don’t think about the non-ant particles, it won’t help.
Black_Gulaman@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
If you smelled poop even if it’s fast away, then poop particles have gone inside your nose, and yes. Tha nose cavity is connected to your mouth cavity.
Good luck sleeping, knowing that whenever you smell disgusting things, they are now also inside your mouth.
efstajas@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Honestly, kind of a blessing. It’s not like you could do much about it if you knew.
Reddfugee42@lemmy.world 6 months ago
When you smell a fart, molecules from someone else’s asshole are inside your nose
CitizenKong@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I mean, your bed is home to tens of thousands of microscopic bugs as well. I’d rather not smell them.
PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
Wait are you telling me y’all actually don’t smell ants? They’re a weird and kinda smell like blue cheese. Definitely the smellier of insects.
clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
I’ve never heard of insects having a smell, other than like stinkbugs!
Allero@lemmy.today 7 months ago
It’s like me figuring out after 23 years that most people don’t sneeze looking at the sun
xx3rawr@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Ant smell is for communicating with other ants. These are ant smellers not human. The ant-people have been controlling our governments. It’s true! Look it up!
Maggoty@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Mine has always been vision and hearing hard sounds, like doors closing. I can hear all the stupid little sounds like that. And I’m just weirdly good at deciphering shadows at night as long as there’s some light.
I’m sure in ancient times this variation of who has good senses for what served a purpose.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Probably similar to that “bitterness” test that a lot of kids got to do in science class where you taste that little strip of paper. To some it’s nothing, to others it’s very bitter. Genetics has given some the extra “taste”, supposedly that might allow people to avoid eating poisonous things containing oxalates or glucosinates. Unfortunately it also means you probably dislike things lie IPA beers or other foods that have bitter compounds that don’t bother others.
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
Gotta love how they see a video talking about it, with comments talking about it, and their first step is to post on Facebook asking about it before doing a simple search on their own.
essteeyou@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Some people wipe standing up…
bamfic@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I can smell wasps nests. The queen odor is very strong to me. But other smells people notice are lost on me.
And I hear everything. Autism I guess.
HeadfullofSoup@kbin.earth 7 months ago
It's seem to be the same as with cilantro a genetic trait that some people have and other don't
https://academic.oup.com/ae/article/61/2/85/1756864?login=false
Dunno if that a good source as everything i found about that exept for thos page talked about the tiktok post and not science
sunbeam60@lemmy.one 7 months ago
Same as asparagus wee. Man, when anyone has eaten asparagus I can smell it before I enter the door to the bathroom. When I have eaten it myself, I’m partly horrified and partly morbidly fascinated. What the fuck is up with only some people being able to smell it.
Lemminary@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I can only smell them when I kill them 🤷♂️
I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I can’t smell living ants, but there’s a common species of ant in the US that smells like rotten coconut when squished.
stanleytweedle@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Formic acid
Raiderkev@lemmy.world 7 months ago
By smell, do u mean like ants are walking by n u can smell them, or like you’re jamming your face into ant hills n giving it a whiff?
dumbass@leminal.space 6 months ago
So, what do ants smell like?
thejoker954@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Great, now im gonna accidently inhale some ants as I try to smell them.
1984@lemmy.today 7 months ago
I never noticed this, but I’m not around ants that much as a software engineer. :)
Big_Bob@hexbear.net 7 months ago
Huh, TIL I can smell ants too.
I used to live in a basement that had regular cycles of ant infestations. I would know they had returned, because the room had started to smell a certain way. Kind of like, damp slightly sweaty skin, but also kind of woody?
Every time I smelt it, I’d always find fresh ant eggs along the wall in the room.
niktemadur@lemmy.world 6 months ago
My mother in law can do it, she’ll walk into a room, sniff disagreeably and say - “Huele a hormiga.”
Bezzelbob@lemmy.world 6 months ago
This makes me wonder all the weird shit we can’t detect just because of our genes. Like I read about this one women who could smell dementia. And to think birds can see UV light and its theorized they can see the fucking earth’s magnetic field which is how they can tell which why is north and south.
Xanthobilly@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Is it the formic acid? I bet it is.
rustyfish@lemmy.world 7 months ago
WHO RUNS AROUND SNIFFING ON ANTS?!
MadBob@feddit.nl 7 months ago
I agree it’s surprising that people can smell ants, but it’s not typing-what-the-fuck-in-all-caps surprising.
Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 6 months ago
See, My Hero Academia is real. It’s just that our quirks suck. Is not having allergies a quirk. Cause that’s the best I’ve got. That or my weak sense of smell. Comes in handy when cleaning disgusting stuff.
TheImpressiveX@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
“Genetic quirk”, you say?
Image
HonkTonkWoman@lemm.ee 7 months ago
“What’s your mutation? Teleportation? Laser Eyes? Weaponized Tornadoes?”
“…I can smell bees…. how about yours?”
“Oh… well… my mutation is that cilantro tastes chalk to me.”
Dasus@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I was born with 2.5 kidneys, an extra ureter and 4 of my permanent teeth never showed up. Also mild colour vision deficiency.
I was talking about it with our first lieutenant in the army and he went “Corporal, you’re a mutant!”. “Yes, sir, I am sir.”
blanketswithsmallpox@lemmy.world 7 months ago
God soap cilantro just sucks. I really wish people knew it tastes like gross to like 3-21% of the world population.
I just wish it wasn’t automatically in anything Mexican. I just want to taste what other people taste. :(
aeronmelon@lemmy.world 7 months ago
The mortality ratio of that school gives me pause.
Also, so many old white guys hanging on the wall.
Sotuanduso@lemm.ee 7 months ago
What the hey? Let them down!
Stalinwolf@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
What is this… Xavier’s school for ANTS?!
jaykay@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
My anime head sees „quirk” think MHA lmao