Colorado Grad Students Win $200K in 'Food Racism' Case

A dispute that began with a comment about a student's reheated lunch has ended with a six-figure payout from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Aditya Prakash and his partner, fellow anthropology PhD student Urmi Bhattacheryya, will receive a combined $200,000 and master's degrees under a settlement resolving their federal civil rights lawsuit, their attorney said, per the New York Times. The couple, both from India, alleged that a remark about the smell of Prakash's palak paneer in a department microwave in September 2023 triggered a yearlong campaign of retaliation that ultimately stripped them of their doctoral funding. They have since left the program and moved back to India.

Prakash said an administrative assistant called his food "pungent" and cited an office rule against strong-smelling dishes. When he objected, he said, she began yelling. Two days later, he and several other students heated Indian food in the same microwave in what they described as a quiet act of protest. Prakash later challenged a departmentwide email discouraging foods with strong smells, while Bhattacheryya hosted him for a guest lecture on cultural relativism, where he brought up the microwave incident as an example of "food racism," per the BBC. Afterward, the couple said they were dropped by their advisers, cited for poor performance, and lost teaching assistant roles.

New York University food scholar Krishnendu Ray tells the Times that complaints about food odors have long been used to stigmatize immigrant communities. "We were 4.0 GPA students," but the department "started trying to sabotage us," says Prakash. The university denied wrongdoing and, citing privacy laws, said it could not address the specifics of the case. But it said it followed established procedures for handling discrimination and harassment claims and that the anthropology department has been working to rebuild trust and foster a more inclusive environment. Prakash tells the BBC the whole point of the lawsuit was to show "there are consequences to discriminating against Indians for their 'Indianness.'"