Food wars

I realize it will come as a profound shock that a bunch of dumbass administrators at the University of Colorado would create six-figure legal liability for their employer by engaging in incredibly obvious retaliation after someone complained about discrimination, but this world is full of signs and wonders:

It started with a comment about a graduate student’s lunch, a creamy Indian dish called palak paneer made with spinach and cheese, that he was heating in an office microwave in the anthropology department at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

“Oof, that’s pungent,” the student, Aditya Prakash, recalled an administrative assistant telling him. Mr. Prakash, an Indian citizen who was studying for a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology, said the administrative assistant then told him there was a rule against microwaving strong-smelling food in the office.

Mr. Prakash said it was the kind of remark that made many Indians in the West afraid to open their lunches in public spaces. 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.

Thus began what Mr. Prakash and Ms. Bhattacheryya described in a federal civil rights lawsuit as a “pattern of escalating retaliation” that ended with the revocation of their doctoral funding.

You can read the rest of the story (gift link) for all the “pungent” details.

A few comments:

If you think Indian food smells bad you have objectively bad taste.

One of the most beneficial aspects of the loosening of immigration laws in the 1960s was that it became possible to purchase a decent meal at a reasonable price at a restaurant in America — something that over the previous decades had become increasingly difficult, as the catastrophic reign of corporatized Anglophilic WASP cuisine became hegemonic outside a handful of urban “ethnic” enclaves. (Something I noticed many decades ago is that it’s an almost invariable rule that in Europe the governments get worse and the food gets better as one moves southward).

There’s a long and interesting sociology of foodways and their political and cultural import in America (I recommend the very amusingThe United States of Arugula as a starting point). This is exactly the kind of thing that the right wing hates about universities, because they want to live in a country with no Indian food, let alone a country where it’s illegal to discriminate against an employee who complains about being criticized for eating something you can’t get at Cracker Barrel, aka the world’s most aptly named food emporium.

It really amazes me how rude people are, or maybe have become (nostalgia is very tricky of course). I dislike the smell of microwaved popcorn but it wouldn’t occur to me in a million years to complain about it. How about just walking away, Extremely Sensitive to Exotic Foreign Smells Administrative Assistant? Or is this some sort of office microwave Castle Doctrine?

It’s also amazing — not really — that nobody in academic administration at least ever seems to be held responsible for this kind of nonsense. The dean of my law school cost her institution hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct and indirect costs, by engaging in flagrant retaliation in writing when I complained about something (her academic speciality is civil rights law, which is the kind of thing you leave out of a novel because it’s way too over the top), and not only was she not fired, she was reappointed by the provost at the end of her contractual term, despite the overwhelming opposition of the faculty.

The Meritocracy!