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It's lunchtime here and somebody just went and cooked a rubbermaid dish full of stinky, sweaty towels.

What? They didn't? That was actually some sort of food that they were planning to eat?

What? They're eating it?!

It really stinks in here, as it does every day around lunch time. The problem is that there's really no good lunch eating area. Well, yeah, I guess there's that big room downstairs with all the tables and the guy with the grill cooking things up. But, aside from that, it's just a lot easier for everyone to just eat at their own desk.

Which is fine. I fully support it. There's not enough room for everyone downstairs in that big room with all the tables anyway (in fact, I get pretty bent out of shape if there are so many people that I can't get my usual table). The problem is that all leftovers are not created equal.

Some people just don't know how to cook. And you can be sure that if the food wasn't good at its premiere, it's not going to be any better at its encore (the same goes for puking up said food). Some people just don't know how to cook, and their spouse is too polite to say anything. That's how the office ends up smelling like a chinese (nothing against the Chinese people, but the resultant odor typically smells more oriental than anything) locker room.

Good lunches can be bad too. There's nothing worse than being hungry and smelling barbecue sauce-drenched ribs when you're waiting for the hot water in your styrofoam cup to make your noodles pliable.

I've been pretty lucky. Annie's a great cook. She doesn't think that she is, but only because she's not here smelling the interesting concoctions that pass as food here. Were she to smell what I smell, and compare it to the aroma of her own creations, she'd readily agree that she's ready for her own TV show.

Whenever Annie doesn't cook and we don't have coupons at Arby's I whip up some pasta or a risotto. It usually comes out pretty good. If nothing else, it smells really good. However good my lunch leftovers are, though, I have to eat them downstairs away from the various smells around my desk. The odors permeating my cubicle change the taste of my food to such a degree that I have to continually watch the food to make sure it doesn't transform into the gym socks it smells like.

Which bring up another question: do people smell differently depending on what they eat?

When I first arrived in Italy I was startled by other missionaries' requests to sniff their arms and tell them what they smelled like. It was kinda creepy. Their theory was that I would be used to how Americans smelled and could therefore detect a change in odor in Americans who had long been exposed to an Italian diet.

The short answer is that I didn't detect any difference in smell in anyone. It's amazing, though, how much different everything smells over there, especially around lunch time. When we were out knocking doors we always knew when lunch time was coming up because we could smell pasta cooking. The streets were filled with the aroma of pasta cooking (it's a great smell, isn't it? It's as good as how rain smells, in my book).

I've heard unsubstantiated rumors that a diet high in garlic will actually scare off mosquitoes (or mosquitos?). I've never done a study of my own, and I'm too lazy too search the words "garlic repel mosquito" in google (on a related note, it's funny how rustic our vocabulary becomes when we do an internet search), but I believe that it's probably true, based on nothing but my own belief (or desire to believe?).

Back to the main point (which is really the subsidiary point), do people smell different based on what they eat? Probably, but only a dog would know for sure.

Recently, I read an article somewhere about how medical researchers are using odor to detect disease. The theory is that the gases and chemicals produced and expelled (not necessarily that kind of expelled) from the body, and in what proportion to each other, can diagnose some conditions. I guess they're already able to "sniff" someone's skin to determine if they have skin cancer. That sure sounds better than just hacking out bits of skin to test them.

This is a really long post, and it doesn't even say anything worthwhile, and I'm not even going to go to the trouble of putting in pictures or links (imagine that there's a picture of a "Cup'o'Noodles" up near the top, and maybe some Chinese athletes about halfway down). My point is this: don't bring a smelly lunch to work.