Alie Ward (host)

It's also the present.

Just a few months ago, a French and a British tennis star faced off in a match with the Brit, who was behind in the match, requesting an intervention from the umpire, saying on camera, can you tell her to wear deodorant?

She's

Now, that player, Team Britain, lost the match anyway and then had to issue a retraction and an apology on social media for the insensitivities toward the l'air du tenu.

So I consulted a thesaurus, and sure enough, unpleasant odors can be noxious, putrid, revolting, malodorous, rank, smelly, rotten, stenchy, stinking, stinky, and reeking.

But it's not often you smell something that you would describe as ambrosial or redolent.

This is why Dr. Lukes, who wrote a PhD and now two books about it, is a pro.

And a few people, Fran, Izzy B., and Aaron White, wanted to know about food.

And Fran said, why do so many white Americans especially claim to hate the smell of garlic or garlic breath?

They've never noticed anyone with bad garlic breath, and garlic is delicious.

However, coffee breath is...

is terrible.

And Izzy V wanted to know, I'm curious about if there's connections between the smells of cultural cuisines mentioned Indian or Mexican cuisine, for example, or diet culture and racism, classism, other prejudices.

So yeah, the different smells of different types of cuisine and how that gets mentioned.

Okay, so I'm mostly Italian, like 75%.

So I honestly did not know that the waft of simmering onions or garlic could possibly be perceived poorly.

Like, what else does food taste like?

And there's this 2016 paper out of the history department of King's College London titled Grease and Sweat, Race and Smell in 18th Century English Culture.

And it notes that at the heart of bristling at a so-called difference in odor was essentially the fear of otherness.

And given our two-part vampirology episode about Eastern European folklore and garlic as a repellent for the undead, there were likely deep fears and associations made with certain food smells.