EDITORS' CORNER
Complaining about food smells is a way ‘white people control your Indianness,’ student says
Two former graduate students settled a discrimination lawsuit with the University of Colorado, Boulder recently regarding a dispute about heating up “pungent” Indian food in an anthropology department microwave.
Aditya Prakash and Urmi Bhattacheryya, who now live in India and are engaged, claimed in their lawsuit that they suffered “microaggressions” and racism for eating their culture’s food while studying at the university, according to the BBC.
The settlement includes $200,000 and the awarding of both students’ master’s degrees, the New York Times reports.
“When these allegations arose in 2023, we took them seriously and adhered to established, robust processes to address them, as we do with all claims of discrimination and harassment,” CU Boulder said in a statement earlier this month. “We reached an agreement with the students in September and deny any liability in this case.”
The alleged problems began on Sept. 5, 2023 when an administrative assistant complained that Prakash’s palak paneer, a spinach and cheese dish that he was heating in the microwave, was “pungent,” according to the reports.
Prakash said the staffer told him the department had a rule “against microwaving strong-smelling food,” the NYT reports:
When he told the administrative assistant that he did not appreciate her comment, she started shouting at him, he said. Two days later, he and four other students, including his partner, Urmi Bhattacheryya, who was also studying for a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology, responded by heating Indian food in the same microwave. …
Mr. Prakash later spoke about the incident in a class discussion about cultural relativism that Ms. Bhattacheryya was leading as a teaching assistant. When he received a departmentwide email suggesting that members avoid preparing food with “strong or lingering smells,” he replied to everyone in the department, saying that the suggestion was discriminatory and asking why it had been OK for an employee to heat chili in a crockpot in the office.
Someone in the department told Mr. Prakash that it would also be wrong to heat broccoli in the microwave, he recalled: “My rejoinder to that was, ‘How many groups of people do you know that face racism on a daily basis because they eat broccoli?’”
In their lawsuit, the couple described the situation as a series of “microaggressions and retaliatory actions,” the BBC reports.
The lawsuit alleges the university accused them of “poor performance” for not completing some of their course assignments, and ended their work as teaching assistants. Eventually, Prakash and Bhattacheryya allege that they “were denied credit transfers and ultimately lost their doctoral funding,” according to the NYT.
“Acts of isolating by my classmates or stopping me from using a shared microwave because of how my food smells are how white people control your Indianness and shrink the spaces you can exist in,” Prakash told the British news outlet.
A citizen of India, Prakash said he probably won’t return to the United States and suggested the country as a whole is racist.
“No matter how good you are at what you do, the system is constantly telling you that because of your skin colour or your nationality, you can be sent back any time,” he told the BBC.
