William Mahan bends over a bowl of raw shrimp and inhales deeply, using his left hand to wave the scent up toward his nose. Deep breath. Exhale. Repeat. He clears his palate with a bowl of freshly cut watermelon before moving on to raw oysters. Deep breath. Exhale. Repeat.
He's one of about 40 inspectors trained recently at a federal fisheries lab in Pascagoula, Miss., to sniff out seafood tainted by oil in the Gulf of Mexico and make sure the product reaching consumers is safe to eat.
— Read more at Trained noses to sniff out Gulf seafood for oil at Yahoo News. Many thanks to Ruth for the link!
I have to read the full article, but it’s amazing (and kind of cool) that there are cases in which we depend on human sensory abilities for this kind of thing. I’m frankly not sure I’m comfortable with that being the final check on something toxic I might be ingesting, but it’s very cool nonetheless.
Ditto on all of that. Going to be very careful about what seafood I buy…
What a horrible job to have!
Might be, I don’t know.
Even before this, we were careful about our seafood -there are tons of shrimp that are imported from China every year and I don’t consider them safe to eat either, mostly because they’re farmed in an artificial environment and I don’t trust their inspection process.
Even worse from a Gulf Coast standpoint, is that this was supposed to be the first good, normal fishing season since Katrina and Rita and now this. For sniffing out tainted seafood, I’m surprised that they haven’t trained dogs – their noses are much more sensitive than the human nose and could easily sniff out any taint.
I thought about dogs too when I was reading this.
Except I can see the dogs just snarfing down all the good ones and leaving the bad ones behind – lol.
We think alike on that!
Maybe there are sanitary issues w/ using dogs? No idea, just guessing.
That would make sense – a well-trained dog wouldn’t eat the fish, but they can’t help slobbering on it.
All of this just makes me so sad.