Could be weirder. All the med students that used to be in halls with me came back with meat cravings after working with cadavers.

Don't worry, OP, that type of association is normal: many things that we find appetizing (e.g. Feta cheese) actually share smells with things we consider actively unpleasant (feta smells like feet). Our brain uses context to sort these dual-nature smells into good vs bad, not because their objectively different but because of what we associate them with. You're new there: you hadn't yet learned to associate that fat-and-skin cooking smell with cauterized wounds, and have had a lifetime of associating it with chicken. Have fun feeling a bit disturbed until you've gotten used to it, though.

Meat is meat.

Once I had a patient from an accident come in with 90% burns. One of the things that bothered me the most was that his burning flesh wasn't this repulsive foreign smell, but more like the smell of meat on a grill. Still bothers me to think about.

I'd always heard from reading anecdotes of like war and stuff that burning humans smell like pork, but that the smell is sickening (maybe because the folk knew what it was).

Go to ancestry.com and check your family tree till you find Hannibal Lecter... that should explain it all.

Human, the other other white meat.

Wait until you're doing cautery at lunch time, standing right next to a patients head, hoping that your stomach won't start growling because it smells like chicken and you're hungry.... Not gross or weird really. It's fairly common it seems.

Burnt flesh smells like burnt hair, not fried chicken.

I work at a dermatology office and we cauterize people's skin all the time and the smell doesn't bother me but to other people, I've noticed that it does.