My cousin Steve grew up in Northfield, MN, which is, despite what the package says, the home of Malt-O-Meal. You can usually smell different production days, but the most obvious is when they are making chocolate Malt-O-Meal. Everywhere you go in town the air smells like chocolate Malt-O-Meal. It swirls, and ebbs and flows around you, and the people smile a little more often.

One thing I miss from when I lived in CA is flowers that smell pretty. Flowers in Alaska generally don't smell, or at least not much. We do have lilacs, but you have to bury your nose in them. The local flowers that do smell, smell bad. I suppose that's no surprise with skunk cabbage, but chocolate lilies, which are beautiful and should smell nice, smell like a rather more unpleasant brown thing instead. My mom picked some before she new, and put them in the house where the warmth brought the smell out. Bad idea.

up until about 20 years ago Hills Brothers had a roastery perched right on the edge of the Bay

I can't believe I missed this. We didn't go over the Bay Bridge often as a kid, but you would think that I would have caught it sometimes. Bummer.

eta: oh, and topic, um... can't wait for the smell of film on the bdm!

The forest around Jenny Lake in Grand Teton National Park is the best smelling forest ever. I wish the scent could be bottled and carried around.

Zoe might smell ever so faintly of jasmine....

And I bet Mal smells GREAT. All hero-ey and stuff.

Not sure about Mal, but I hear good things about Nathan's smell.

Years and years later, when I was in college and we roadtripped up to Dixville Notch in NH, we passed through the mill town of Berlin and those not-from-around-here had to breathe through the Dunkin Donuts box. I was oddly nostalgic.

Okay, this just made me laugh and laugh and laugh.

Before that, though, were the salt flats of Machias, way up the coast near Canada, when the tide was low. There was some kind of bridge from one part of town to another that went over the marshes, and the whole area smelled like farts.

Oh yeah - marshes are wicked stinky. But I can top that. I can't remember if it was due to red tide or some other oceanic event, but the smell of dead, bloated pogies in the height of summer pretty much tops the list of the vomitous.

Though I heard those who got a little too close to a whale necropsy on Nantucket got a similar stench.

I hear good things about Nathan's smell.

Bunk-bound, that's me.

Plus. The Wonder Bread factory of my 3rd grade field trip smelled strongly like burning rubber. Once they told us how 'fun' it was that you could make pencil erasers out of the bread (just roll it into a ball and wet is slightly)...complete with demonstration...I swore off the stuff.

Come to think of it, it always felt like rubber in my tumbly.

Now, I'm off to sniff Nathan in my dreams.

Oh yeah, I grew up in a coastal town that suffered (and doubtless still suffers) from awful red tide. The smell was terrible--exactly like diarrhea. I couldn't understand why anyone would buy the houses right along the worst stretch of beach, but they sold for lots of money. Craxy people! A lovely ocean view is not worth the price of not being able to open your windows all summer long.

I grew up in a town with an abitibi plant. I understand it moved on not long after I did. But the smell was both unpleasant and reassuring. As my dad's friends used to say, it smelled like money.

Otherwise, Alpena, MI mostly smelled like clean lake smells. There weren't many fish kills or other immediately obvious ecological disasters, so things smelled wet and green. I kinda miss that.

The thing with cowshit and chickenshit is that, free-range animals' poop doesn't really smell all that bad. I mean, it's not a walk in the arboretum, but it's an organic, basically recycled vegetation smell. When you drive by factory farms or chickenhouses (of which there are many in NC), what you get hit by is concentrated essence of the excreta of animals fed commercial feeds and mixes containing ground-up bits of their former compadres. And as we all know, the poop of carnivores smells a lot more nasty than that of herbivores.

Chickenshit smells worse than cowflop, anyway, and pigshit is worse than chickenpoop, even if the animals are healthy and free range, though.

ETA: For my money, though, Calli is right. The worst smell is wood fiber: wood pulp for OSB, plywood, chipboard. Urk. The second worst is papermills, which also use wood pulp, plus chemicals and other fibers.

And...I'll bet Mal was familiar with livestock, on his mom's ranch, and could tell if an animal was ill by the smell of its poop.

I'll bet the Alliance has a lot of papermills.