My Ethnic Food

Berkeley Law Library, Reading Room
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
1:30 pm

We’d just completed the bar review torts lecture and I was decompressing with some past Lakers-Celtics highlights on YouTube when an older stranger with a sympathetic look on her face approached me and stated:

“I’m sorry, somebody’s complaining about the smell of your food. You’ll have to eat it outside.”

Momentarily confused, I instinctively responded:

“Okay.”

After the library staff member scurried out of the reading room, I took a look at my food: some cold bulgogi over rice with a side of kimchee in a Styrofoam take-out container. My housemate and I had retrieved some leftovers from the fridge in the law review office moments earlier.

A friend, who was sitting directly across from me at our rectangular 8-foot desk, noted what I was just beginning to observe:

“That was bullshit. I can’t even smell anything.”

Obviously I’m biased, as the accused in this case, but the only thing I could smell at that point was the vinaigrette dressing on my friend’s salad, presumably purchased from Café Zeb, just down the hall from the library.

I put my food away and thought about going outside to eat, then was suddenly struck by how easy it had been to relegate me to the position of some second-class citizen, with no basis whatsoever.

Angered, I took a look around to see who might have a problem with my food. A couple of students were quietly studying at their desks, but the rows of desks had fifteen feet of separation between them and the desks within rows were separated by a good three-and-a-half feet. Nobody was within smelling distance of my food, but my food had been open and obvious for people to see. I came to the conclusion that the complainant was actually offended by the appearance of my food, because the only perception of my lunch that anyone around me could have had would have been based on sight alone.

So who would have a problem with the way my food looked? I spotted an uptight-looking brunette, mid-30s, angrily mousing away at her laptop and seated about twenty-five feet behind me me. Maybe it was the tall blonde with his back to me and his headphones on, sitting fifteen feet away. Though in closest proximity to my food, I doubted that it was the Chinese LLM student quietly highlighting her notecards at the desk to my right—she seemed more unprepared for confrontation than even myself. This was sad, because my lack of confrontational instinct had just cost me my ability to have lunch.

After all, if I had asked the library staff member what rule was in place to justify my having to eat outside, I’m sure I would’ve little more than a blank stare as a response. The only rule I was aware of was that if one wanted to have lunch in the library, one would have to eat in the reading room and any drinks had to exist in a secured container. My LexisNexis water bottle seemed pretty secure and I’m pretty confident that I could’ve prevailed in an impromptu legal argument. However, I knew that the library staff member was just the messenger, and I felt sorry that she was forced to comply with the orders of whatever bland, super-entitled, Apple-Pie-normative law student had decided that the sight of kimchee and bulgogi in a take-out container was going to make it impossible for her to pass the bar exam and sue people like me for offending her sensibilities.

Frustrated by the subtle inequities of the modern world and by the way my cooperative instincts had just negated whatever advantage a knowledge of the law had given me, I returned to my pointless study of torts.