[*Anya*]

There are a couple of ways to look at this. Yes, social responsibility and empathy towards others vs. personal rights and freedoms.

I have asthma. It is well-controlled and I take my asthma meds, which is my responsibility to do.

I can have a someone walk by me, or be trapped in a bus, office setting or airplane with someone that put on a very strongly scented perfume or colone and fairly rapidly, start wheezing.

Do I think that people have the right to wear scents- yes they do. Do they also have some responsibility to not put so much on that I can smell them 30 rows down in the airplane? Yes, I believe that they do. I also have the right to be able to breath.

Cooking smells are a little trickier because frequently culture is involved. I worked at a county mental health department during the time that a great many Vietnamese folks came to the US after the Vietnam war ended and the county started a mental health program for them. Of course, they brought their foods and culture with them. All of us were unfamiliar with them and some of the cooking odors did last in the building for hours.

The smell did not make me wheeze but after several hours, maybe a little queasy, in the same way that any food of any culture, smelling it for hours in an office would. I dealt with it, as all of us did out of sensitivity.

Can I see that someone might not like smelling food in an office setting? Yes. Do we have the right to demand that people not eat the food of their choice or culture at work? Not so much.

We all should just follow the golden rule, right?