I’ve been wasting way too much time over at Passive-Aggressive Notes (http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com/). But reading one of the notes reminded me of one of the most annoying situations I ever dealt with living in a residence hall with students.
I was a hall director at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, many years ago. I had an apartment with a kitchen there as well. Inevitably I cooked there quite a bit.
Most of the kids in the hall were Inland Empire Californians, with the occasional Southlander or Bay Area resident mixed in. Not much in the way of ethnic diversity. Which isn’t an issue per se, but it became relevant.
I’m Black, and on top of that half Jamaican, so curry features prominently in my diet. (Realistically, I’d say I’d make curry one a month or so.) I always tried to run the fan to keep the smell to a minimum. But students would sometimes let me know that the hallway “stunk.” Not “smells interesting,” but “stunk.” (I got to smell stale vomit and sweatsocks on a fairly regular basis but that’s another story.) Usually I’d make a comment about “perhaps you’re not familiar with other cultural foods” and daydream about punching the kid in the mouth.
Of course the days I baked a ziti I never got complaints. I surmised that your average American youth has pretty limited tastes. If you grilled burgers all the time, no worries. But if you made curry (and my fellow hall director, who was Japanese and also a curry fan) you were “stinky.”
Just wondering, what are other people’s take on this? If you are of a minority ethnic background or appreciate the food, what do you make of complaints about your food being cooked? I get pretty punchy when people speak disparingly about cultural foods, because… it’s culture. I’m amazed that people do this without considering the cultural insensitivity of such comments.
(Personally, the worst food smell I’ve experienced was in Harvard Square, at The Garage (a little mini-mall). If you walked on Mt. Auburn Street you would get a coffee/tea smell intermingled with a bagel scent. Independently the smells were fine, but together, they made me gag…)
Well, how do we find a standard of what makes a “stink?” Is it because some kid who’s used to smelling hot dogs and meatloaf is smelling something different?
If you walk past a fine dining Indian restaurant - that’s exactly what curry smells like. Is that a “stink?”
Personally, I’m repulsed by the smell of boiled eggs, but I would never tell someone eating or preparing them that their food stinks. If you asked me my honest opinion I would.
It strikes me as incredibly culturally and ethnically insensitive to take the approach you propose, Lanzy.
There’s not an objective standard of “stink” just like there’s not an objective standard of “yummy.”
Sometimes a person just flat doesn’t like a certain smell, no matter how familiar it is. You are, presumably, well familiar with the smell of boiled eggs. The fact that you find the smell repulsive has dick-all to do with the narrowness of your horizons, so it strikes me as smarmy and condescending when you automatically assume that explanation for someone not liking the smell of curry. Insulting someone when they complain about something you’re doing is only the correct way to deal with a situation that you want to escalate, not one you want to resolve.
If you really want to resolve this in a civilized way, not just justify using cultural diversity as a free pass to do anything you damn well want and everybody else can just suck it, you ask them if there’s anything else you can do to help contain the smell or changes you can make to the recipe to make it not smell as bad to them. Sometimes it’s just one ingredient that other people really, really hate. Depending on their response, then you work from there.
And yes, some versions of curry stink like hell. I’m not sure what’s in them, but it smells like a cross between a very aged blue cheese and a 3-week-dead goat that’s been smeared with patchouli. If the common areas of my home smelled like that on a regular basis, I’m not sure I could refrain from saying something. And I say this as someone who loves curry. Just because something tastes good, that doesn’t mean it smells good–fresh grated parmesan is delicious, but it quite frankly smells like old gym socks.
Oddly enough, it’s a slow day here and I was reading Passive-Aggressive Notes as well.
We sometimes have this issue at work.
So far, the people who have been successful at navigating this seem to have taken a “killing with kindness” approach. Sort of a “hey, I’m making some food that you might not be familiar with! It’s a traditional (ethnicity or country) dish! Gosh, the smell might be a little unusual if you have never experienced it before! I’m going to make some to share and you can all try it and maybe you will like tasting a new thing!”
There is sometimes still low-key grumbling in the future, but it cuts down on the “WTF is that?” commentary somewhat. Because this is student affairs, people will also turn it around by saying (seriously, not sarcastically, although I think it would be hard to pull off outside of higher ed) “Gee, I’m going to be heating up curry today for lunch, so I wanted to give you a heads up so that you could plan around it if you think it might bother you.”
In the office, we also have a rule where all food waste – used paper plates, empty containers, fruit peels, etc – must be taken out immediately to the garbage chute and not put in the trash can next to your desk. This is because our building has an insect problem … but the bonus is that it also helps with the smells from all sorts of strong-smelling food. The vermin issue was so bad that now we’re all sort of shell-shocked from it and rigorously scold any new people who don’t take it seriously at first.
I don’t think “this hallway stinks” is exactly broaching the topic in a sensitive manner. You make it sound as if someone pleasantly inquired about what’s cooking, etc.
Well, that would require some familiarity with the ingredients. Someone who proclaims what you’re preparing “stinks” doesn’t strike me as someone who will say, “Man, you’ve got a tad too much fenugreek in there.”
I’m not an alien. 90% of the stuff I cook is pretty middle American fare. And yes, curry does linger, so as I said I would take precautions (running the fan, boiling an apple and cinnamon, etc.). I still suspect that the attitude that different=bad, gross, smelly, etc. is what’s at heart here. I’m in a much more cultural diverse environment here, and I can’t imagine that being a problem here in Austin, Texas.
I don’t know what kind of curry it is that you’re eating. There’s certainly no cheese smell in the curry I prepare. Fenugreek and tumeric are the dominant spices.
I’m not sure that it’s cultural at all. Maybe your curry smells delicious, but I know from stink.
When I was a bank teller, the break room at that branch was downstairs. A woman that worked there would sometimes cook up a big pot of what she said was a traditional Chinese dish. It was something like rice, turnips, and liver sausages. Whatever it was, it had a powerful stink that was overwhelming. It would waft upstairs and the entire bank would smell that way for hours.
I’m not sure if it was supposed to smell that way or if she was just a terrible cook, but it was one of the least appetizing smells I have ever encountered. Customers would come in and crinkle their noses and ask if something had died or if we’d just gotten sprayed for bugs or something. When I told them that was someone’s lunch, they’d look totally astonished.
That wasn’t cultural. It was just plain offensive.
Some curries smell incredibly strong, or, combined with the other scents of standard human living, may smell a tad…yucky. I cook Indian food all the time and, I gotta tell you, sometimes even I cringe a little if I’m too close to the pot. South Indian curries frequently include curry leaves aesofetida powder, which are both quite acrid.
Anyway, my point is that many curries use ingredients in them in small amounts that can really reek. Take fish sauce, for example. It’s an absolute necessity if you’re making Thai, but that stuff smells like feet.
Additionally, in the U.S., you really don’t smell the same smell of human living as you do other places because of our sometimes ridiculous standards of cleanliness. I’m not saying that being clean is bad, but we certainly do go out of our way to eradicate any odor that’s not “springtime fresh.” You can’t watch any daytime TV without seeing commercials for Febreeze.
Either way, I disagree with the OP that it’s “cultural insensitivity” that’s making people go “Ick.” I think it’s a combination of really strong ingredients and also the fact that many people have simply become accustomed to extraordinarily sterile-smelling environments.
I think it’s pretty rude of you to do that. You know that most of the people in your residence hall can’t stand the smell, and yet, you cook it anyway. You really don’t see a problem with that?
If I’m in the company of a different culture, I’ll do my best to be respectful of their culture. If they think the smell of rib eye steaks is repulsive, then I’m not going to cook it.
Why the automatic assumption it’s a cultural issue?
There are certain food smells which are both pungent and long-lasting… which is what most people in North America mean by “stinky”. I think there’s a pretty universal agreement that some things, like boiled cabbage, stinky cheese, curries and salt fish aren’t particularly pleasant smells, even to an adventurous eater.
For example - I love me some salt cod… I grew up eating my Portuguese grandmother’s food, and thee’s little that makes me happier than a freshly made codfish dumpling. That said, I wouldn’t ever cook salt cod in a shared space. It’s ridiculously stinky stuff, and the smell of it permeates the house for several hours after the cooking is done. Hell, I put up with the smell only because the taste is so darn good, so I have to accept that other folks probably won’t be fans… it’s just good manners not to subject them to the smell.
Same thing goes with curry. It’s delicious stuff, but the smell tends to linger long after the curry is gone… so I make it when I’m home alone (or with an appreciative audience) and don’t bring leftovers to work.
snort It took me way too long to get this. And even longer to recover from snorting water out my nose while laughing (I was drinking water at the time, not using my nose as a straw).
Unlike the students in the residence hall I eat there. I don’t have a meal plan, I have a kitchen in which to cook.
Not all of the people can’t stand the smell. I can count the people on my hand that complained, and the vast majority never said a word one way or the other. The students that worked did come by for curry, though.
So by this logic, if someone complains to you rudely, you change your eating habits? Listen, if a petition came through signed by a number of residents, fair enough. If a bunch of people complained, sure. But I’m talking about maybe five people commenting on it. I certainly had more than five coming by for a taste. And the “different culture” you refer to I thought included West Indian food. There’s Cuban, Caribbean, and Indian restaurants in my town here. Nobody’s pan-frying a dog or cracking open a durian.
I have to say I’m pretty surprised at the reaction here. When I was living in the halls as a regular resident at UT Austin, people had all kinds of random foods in their fridges and microwaves. So you would smell Korean food, Mexican food, and yes, curry. I never noticed it one way or the other. Now dirty clothes, sweatsocks, stale beer, and day old vomit - those were the smells that made me ill.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of it were cultural - but I also would hesitate to say that it was entirely cultural.
In my previous office, which was multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and filled with people who enjoyed a wide variety of foods from different parts of the world, the two stinky food problems that ended up requiring HR intervention were microwaved fish and burnt popcorn. Neither of them is exotic by any stretch of the word. But both smells stink and linger. There are other smells that do the same.
Of course, we weren’t there, we don’t know the students who complained, and we don’t have the benefit of seeing how they reacted to other things that were outside of their culture - so, it could be that this is one of the many ways those particular students were cultural dolts. Or it could be that the curry in question stunk.
I don’t think it’s cultural. As Amerarinth said, fish and (burnt) popcorn are standard American fare, and most folks rightly agree that people who cook them at work should be beaten with sticks. I’m not sure I’d immediately recoginize the smell of curry, but if it’s as bad a microwaved fish…
I spent two years dealing with nausea everyday. Now, a year later, some smells still bother me to the point of wanting to run and hurl in the very nearest bathroom. Some people just have a more sensitive sense of smell than others. What is cultural about that?
It sounds like you think it’s their fault that the food stinks to them. How can I control the revulsion that I feel when I smell freshly brewed coffee? I mean, perhaps the people are lacking tact, but that has nothing to do with what country your cuisine originated in.
I think people should be able to live with curry once a month (curry doesn’t “stink” to me - but my husband fries an egg in the morning some mornings, and the smell makes me gag). They should also understand you are taking steps to keep the smell reasonable, and complain in a fashion that is grown up. But then - this is dorm life - you don’t really expect grown ups in a dorm. On the other hand, you expect in dorm communal living to have to put up with all sorts of stuff that is higher on the scale of offense than curry - roommates who don’t know what a laundry hamper is (or the laundry), roommates who think that a room meant for two can reasonably house their girlfriend - who they like to have sex with whenever you need to study or sleep, the less than pleasant smell of pot being inadequately covered up with patchouli. Someone who has discovered bad 70s metal or 80s punk and feels the need to expand your musical taste. The aforementioned trip to the bathroom to find that someone has discovered that too much tequila leads to projectile vomiting.
I agree with elfkin477’s agreement. Some smells are just more fragrant and tend to linger longer, fish and microwave popcorn being two great examples. Hell, I have had people say that my house stank when making bagels. It was in no way related to cultural insensitivity, but more of an honest appraisal of what happens when you work with large amounts of barley malt, yeast, and boiling water. Your kitchen ends up smelling like Milwaukee.
Your right to enjoy a sensual experience ends where it affects someone else’s enjoyment of a common area. That is, I enjoy hard rock. I don’t have the right to turn it up so loud that my neighbors hear it, whether they want to or not. If someone says that a food item is stinky, then quite likely it is affecting other people, too, and not in an enjoyable way. Ziti doesn’t have the olfactory power that curry does.
After all, nobody is actually justifying anyone’s right to vomit or have dirty laundry when it affects the smell of the common areas. Yes, it happens, but the offender should take steps to remedy it.
When we live in a communal area, that means that we have to make adjustments in what we, personally, would prefer to do. If you want to make strong-smelling food, then you should find a place to live, or at least to cook, where people aren’t going to be offended by it. Perhaps you and your fellow curry eaters could rent a house together, and then all of you could regularly enjoy curry. But if you are aware that your habits are causing distress to other people, and you don’t change your habits, I’d call that the definition of a jerk.
