Dr. Ally/Allie Louks

Coffee breath.

Coffee Breath reminded me of this novel called Come Join Our Disease by Sam Byers, who writes so wonderfully about the smells associated with the commute, kind of the work commute, and the long incubated farts and dehydrated spit.

And it's incredibly...

just so precise the way he's able to evoke these particular smells.

And I think, you know, stale coffee breath is one of those things that he locates as well as a kind of pervasive feature of the London commute, especially.

And then the other question was about kind of

Racism and ethnic cuisines.

We actually talk about this a fair amount, I think, in public discourse, the kind of the idea that people will go to school or to their workplace and they'll bring food.

with them a lunch that is specific to their culture, you know, the food that they grew up eating, which is really comforting to them.

And other people will kind of turn their nose up and make them feel bad about eating it.

And we've seen actually like bans on this kind of thing in public libraries, where you'll say like, don't bring in smelly foods.

And sometimes they'll specify what kind of smelly foods they mean.

And they'll say things like, you know, samosas.

And you think, well,

You know, fish and chips are really smelly as well, but you're not isolating that as a thing that you're not allowed to bring into this public space.

So that clearly has some kind of racial component to it.

I think we should take it seriously, actually.

It's worth having those conversations, I think.

Oh, that's OK.

I wasn't alive then.