Parents may choose to pack their child’s school lunch for several reasons, including nutritional control, saving money, and even teaching them responsibility.

Reddit user Pastel-Clouds-808 also does this. However, the woman was recently approached by her daughter’s classmate’s mom, and the lady told her she needed to stop, or at least change the menu.

The reason was simple: her son couldn’t stand the smell.

The Redditor replied that the boy was free to choose another chair at the cafeteria, but the lady wouldn’t budge and the two mothers got into a heated argument.

Unsure if she handled the situation correctly, Pastel-Clouds-808 made a post on the popular subreddit ‘Am I the [Jerk]?‘ describing what exactly happened during the exchange and asked the members of the sub to share their take on it.

This woman was packing her daughter Asian food for lunch

Image credits: Fernando Santos (not the actual photo)

But the girl’s classmate thought it smelled disgusting

Image credits: halfpoint (not the actual photo)

Image credits: Pastel-Clouds-808

Image credits: Markus Winkler (not the actual photo)

To the untrained taste palate, Asian cuisine can take some time to get used to

Asian food can, indeed, have a variety of smells. For example, writer Vivian Giang, who grew up in a Vietnamese-Chinese family, said her favorite dishes from childhood included ca chien sot ca — fried fish with tomato sauce and drenched with garlic fish (yes, more fish!) sauce — and ca kho to — braised fish simmered with caramel sauce with tons of shallots, peppers, and garlic cooked in a clay pot.

“To this day I can’t stop salivating every time bo kho is on the stove (a rich, hearty beef stew slow-cooked for hours with gelatin-rich beef stock, aromatic spices, potatoes, carrots, lime juice, and fresh herbs),” Giang wrote.

“Every morning (and on cold nights), my Chinese grandfather would make a generous pot of congee and we’d eat the piping hot rice porridge with fermented bean curd, pickled preserves, and century eggs.”

“And then there’s bun bo hue, a brothy noodle stew cooked with tender brisket, lemongrass, basil, shallots, and fresh herbs exploding with so much flavor, you’ll find yourself literally crying into your bowl as you eat it because it’s just so spicy, hot, and delicious.”

But Giang said that these dishes came with an ‘added’ price, or as she called it, “the lingering smells that cling to every fiber of your being until it seeps into your pores.”

Even today, when Giang talks to her friends from immigrant families, they cringe “at the memory of their own childhood homes permeated with smelly ‘ethnic’ foods.”

However, without having an extensive list of the dishes that the Redditor packed her daughter, we cannot determine how bad (or good) it smelled

Parents should take extra precautions when preparing and packing their kid’s school lunches, as flunking in food safety is not an option. Especially when children are most vulnerable to foodborne illness.

The USDA has some tips to help them, but they’re mostly about keeping cold foods cold and hot foods hot, keeping raw meats separate from ready-to-eat foods, proper refrigeration, and so on.

As long as the dishes are well prepared and safe to consume, the smells are more of a mutual understanding kind of thing.

What’s certain, however, is that you probably shouldn’t insult a person and call their meals disgusting if you want something from them.

As her story went viral, the mom provided more information in the comments

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And most people said she did nothing wrong

But some believed she could be more considerate

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