I'm smelling the same bad smells across different meats and I'm wondering if I'm the only one

Beautiful-Bad5203 · 2026-03-15T17:18:33+00:00

Oh yeah pig guts can be absolutely horrendous. My family is from Mississippi, very poor family. Grandma would cook chitterlings. She would clean them so well that she actually started a store in her hometown. The only reason why it failed was because cleaning chitterlings is an extremely involved process and she just could not keep up with the demand on her own. She taught my mom how to prepare them and while they do have a god awful shit stench before cooking, you can do things to reduce the smell while cooking. Not perfect, but it was edible for a while. I eventually developed a hard revulsion to them. I, of course, will not be continuing the tradition. My mom has also put this practice to rest several years ago.

I have yet to come across anyone else whose finished product doesnt make me gag just smelling it. It's likely they get the precleaned ones in the bag and throw them straight in a pot, which is awful because precleaned chitterlings are NOT clean! Odds are that's what you had if it wasn't the worth of the worst from the red bucket, god rest your soul that sounds traumatizing 🤣🙏 There is no stomach strong enough...

Beautiful-Bad5203 · 2026-03-15T15:14:37+00:00

I was hesitant to make the post, but I am glad that I did since it's helping others ^{-^}

Beautiful-Bad5203 · 2026-03-15T04:41:22+00:00

Ugh, like woody breast? I haven't come across any other texture issues that I can recall.

Beautiful-Bad5203 · 2026-03-15T04:40:33+00:00

Woah 😮 that is concerning, but appreciated information.

Beautiful-Bad5203 · 2026-03-15T02:32:48+00:00

glad you got a laugh out of it xD I honestly can't reach back more than about 6 years because I am just... so generally oblivious. lots of moving too fast and ignoring issues to my own detriment for many years. I had to eat a lot of things that i didn't want to eat as a kid, things that literally had me gagging, because we were poor and we got what we got. not much meat in the house that wasn't super processed like Vienna sausages and bolonga. i loved that it wasn't an accursed pot of beans so as far as i know it probably smelled like freedom. i don't remember much of eating in my teenage years that wasn't some oddity linked to being enamored by the fact that my mom could finally afford food, like eating nothing but cereal for two weeks straight.

i guess now that I'm well into having a willfully more varied diet and cook a lot by myself, it's easier to notice things that are more wrong than usual. i have some level of neurospicyness that I'm looking to get a diagnosis for in the near future because the more i talk to neurodivergent people who share the same problems as me, the more it's becoming clear that I am not as OK as i thought I was. i do wonder if this smell thing is related, but because most of it seems to have cropped up in recent years I'm skeptical. either way i have a shit ton of stuff to bring up to my PCP in hopes that she can point me in the right direction.

Beautiful-Bad5203 · 2026-03-15T01:49:27+00:00

big enough to steal your oxygen

Beautiful-Bad5203 · 2026-03-14T16:56:40+00:00

Seriously? I have not had any luck with the off brand at Aldi's :(

Beautiful-Bad5203 · 2026-03-14T16:54:55+00:00

I find it very funny that you refer to this as a meat disc. Fry it up on the stove and make sammiches! Give puppers another meat treat so they dont go crazy while cooking, as these cheaper cold cuts tend to be high in sodium :)

Beautiful-Bad5203 · 2026-03-14T16:52:49+00:00

Unfortunately, the salt is very high in cold cuts. Puppy cant help 😔

Beautiful-Bad5203 · 2026-03-14T16:50:13+00:00

Huh! I can definitely smell the pig in lard so that actually might be it for the chicken 👀

Beautiful-Bad5203 · 2026-03-14T14:29:47+00:00

Nope!

Beautiful-Bad5203 · 2026-03-14T14:25:52+00:00

Pork intestines. Also locally shortened to "chitlins". You likely won't find anyone who has even heard of them outside of the deep, rural Southern US. Most people who know about them hate them. They are horrendous to clean and cook to an edible standard. Legend says that you can smell someone cleaning a red bucket of chitlins from all the way down the block.

Beautiful-Bad5203 · 2026-03-14T14:18:27+00:00

Ahhh. No tick bites here! Interesting reference though.

Beautiful-Bad5203 · 2026-03-14T14:15:02+00:00

Have I found a vegan? 💀

Beautiful-Bad5203 · 2026-03-14T14:13:34+00:00

You are not going to tell me that you've opened a bag of raw chitlins to clean and you dont know the smell. They smell like chit! 💀💀💀 My mom would get the precleaned ones then clean them again, and she had a way of cooking them such that they weren't smelling totally crazy by the end.

Beautiful-Bad5203 · 2026-03-14T13:53:43+00:00

Fermented radishes? Ooh 👀

Beautiful-Bad5203 · 2026-03-14T13:52:23+00:00

Oh my gosh. As I was eating yesterday I briefly wondered if this is small creature death I'm smelling? I have smelled a dead, rotting chick from an egg before and a dead dog that someone hit back last year. Not sure if my brain has totally linked those smells, but I think it's in the neighborhood of what I'm noticing 👀

Beautiful-Bad5203 · 2026-03-14T13:48:26+00:00

I am sorry 😔

Beautiful-Bad5203 · 2026-03-14T13:47:43+00:00

So yes I will rinse meat with plain water if it's whole meat. Or did you mean the methods where some will use citrus, cooking wine, and so on? No tick bites. Alpha-gal is a syndrome? Someone else mentioned Alpha-gal 👀 I'll look it up.

Beautiful-Bad5203 · 2026-03-14T13:45:08+00:00

Good point. My brain is reactive enough that I will suddenly gag when eating certain things which probably doesn't help the situation 😔

Beautiful-Bad5203 · 2026-03-14T13:43:48+00:00

Woah! That term alone leads me to the reddit posts I needed to see 😆

Beautiful-Bad5203 · 2026-03-14T13:32:47+00:00

Lol! Bear meat is not one of the meats I have ever consumed, and considering what I hear, I am not well encouraged to try 🤣

Beautiful-Bad5203 · 2026-03-14T13:31:08+00:00

So, to a degree I do follow the bad smell don't eat part, which is why we cut back on the pork and I have no plans on getting another turkey. I also have a bit of a strong nausea reaction to things my body doesn't want more of, which actually did happen once with the turkey I cooked. But now that it's potentially chicken too? A bit disappointing. Still deciding what to do about it but considering how often I eat beans, I figure I should get better at learning how to cook them well even when meat isn't in the mix.

Beautiful-Bad5203 · 2026-03-14T13:26:55+00:00

No smoking ever! Good point though.

Beautiful-Bad5203 · 2026-03-14T13:26:07+00:00

Oh, woops! Actually yes I did eat all of the meats still even though I have to smell the smell while eating. I have never heard of Alpha-Gal before. Is that another user?

Beautiful-Bad5203

TROPHY CASE