Professional Ham Sniffers In Spain Are Strained "To The Limit Of Human Possibility", Have To Sniff 800 Hams Per Day This Christmas Season
Denis Doyle. Getty Images.WSJ - Life revolves around Plaza del Jamón, or “Ham Square,” in Andalusia, where Cinco Jotas began producing Iberian ham in 1879.
Many of the company’s practices in Jabugo, a village of roughly 2,300 inhabitants, are still 19th-century. It smokes chorizo in a room full of oak fires spilling smoke upon a ceiling full of hanging sausages. It cures hams in a cellar that employees climate-control by manually opening and closing windows.
One aspect of Cinco Jotas’ quality control beats its other Old World habits by a nose: a cadre of six sniffers whose job is to poke each pork loin in four specific places with probes made of cow bone and take evaluative whiffs…
…Mr. Vega is the only sniffer who holds on to the job year-round, a distinction he has held since 2004…During low season, in February, Mr. Vega will smell 200 hams a day, he said. Now at the climax of demand he is whiffing 800 loins a day—that’s 3,200 sniffs. He is strained, he said, “at the limit of human possibility.” He has started taking 10-minute breaks every two hours.
Advertisement
I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who are thinking that being a professional ham sniffer sounds like a dream job. They think that they'd give anything to be able to stop crunching numbers all day and live a life where they get paid to smell some deliciously smoked, salted cured meats all day. But that would be a classic case of "be careful what you wish for".
You see, there's a major difference between eating food and working with food. You might like ham. Hell, you might even love ham. But you love the final product. You love when it is presented to you and you devour that shit immediately after. It would be a totally different story if you were surrounded by constantly.
For example, I cook a ton of barbecue. We're talking a LOT of barbecue.
Advertisement
That's a lot of meat. You'd think with all that meat that I'd be an absolute unit by now. Just as large as humanly possible. But the thing is that I don't eat a lot of barbecue. In fact I hardly ever eat any at all. Not because I don't like it. But because by the time you're done looking and smelling everything you've been smoking for 6 or 8 or 10 or 12 hours, you can't even think about eating it. You're borderline repulsed by the idea of fixing yourself a plate. Because you already ate it enough with your eyes and nose.
Point I'm getting at here is you have somebody like this Mr. Vega in Spain who gets to be surrounded by all this delicious Iberian ham every day. You think it's a dream job until you realize he has to smell 800 of them a day and by the time that's over with, he probably hasn't been able to take a single bite of ham in years. All of a sudden this dream turns into a nightmare.
So if there is anyone you should be keeping in your thoughts and prayers this holiday season, it's these ham sniffers in Spain who are making the ultimate sacrifice for the better good of humanity. They are putting their bodies on the line to make sure that everybody else gets to enjoy that sweet, salty, smoky, delicious taste of ham for Christmas so that all can be right in the world. These brave men and women are heroes. Without them, we'd be nothing.