Visiting the Plant

I went to the family's meat processing plant yesterday. It'd been a while since I had walked through it and I had almost forgotten how much I love going because it smells great in there. We don't have a kill floor like at a slaughter house. Slaughter houses don't smell good. They smell like blood and feces. There's a little blood smell in the plant but only so much as you'd smell in a rare steak. The rest of the smell is that of spice, meat just out of the oven, and deli meat in the drying rooms. I can usually identify what's in a room by the smell. Pot roast in the ovens, BBQ pork in sauce, pepperoni hanging from steel rafters, and so on.
The plant is being remodeled so we can process raw food. Product that's finished raw and product that's finished cooked are supposed to be kept completely seperate from each other till they reach your fridge at home. They're also putting in some big freezers so that they don't have pay to store food elsewhere. Construction is always a hassle for everyone involved but it was still nice to see private contractors at work ever since the housing bubble popped and flooded New Orleans.