12 hours ago
1
July 15, 2026 — 11:30am
Let’s ban tuna in the office. I can smell it in the sink. It stinks up the drain. I can whiff it after someone drains a tin or rinses a plate. It lingers in the hall, like a guest who won’t go home, and it trails on clothes like perfume.
A colleague has said suggesting a ban in the office is going to start a war. Another reported working in an office in London where it nearly did. After colleagues from South Asia brought in fish and curries, his boss put a note out “banning” fish and curries at lunch. “There was nearly a revolt, and he had to reverse the ban.”
Wondering if it was just me – and a few others in our office who are equally repulsed by the smell of fish in the office – I contacted some experts on food science. Professor John Prescott, an academic and the author of Taste Matters: Why We Like the Foods We Do, said many people had a strong response to the smell of fish. But a ban on fish in the office? “No – no banning of canned fish!” said Prescott, a director at TasteMatters Research & Consulting.
He posed: “What if your office colleague demanded that you not use Vegemite or eat a hot pie? Of course, people may agree that some smells are just too much. In Singapore, eating durian is banned on public transport and I suspect that most people agree with that.”
I told him about my sensitivity to the smell of fish, which is place-specific. Fish in the office makes me gag. Fish at home – in a good salade niçoise, some fresh prawns or oysters – is the making of a happy lunch. I remember gorging on chilli crab on a work trip to Singapore years ago with the late senator John Button, an industry minister in the Hawke-Keating government. He commented: “Julie, if only you showed the same enthusiasm for industry policy.”
I sometimes wonder if I am a super smeller. Perhaps I can smell rare diseases? At least that would be helpful. I can smell mould, and rain in the new metros. Imperial Leather soap is something I used to love but now makes me gag, and there is that new male perfume that smells like parsnips.
Prescott said fish can be a problem, especially if it is not fresh because of the odour of various amines and other quite smelly compounds it produces.
“While these are generally associated with rotten fish, I suspect that many of us become sensitised to even low levels of these as signals for ‘offness’ even when dealing with the fresh product.”
Whether a smell is objectionable was determined to a large extent by individual experience as well as culture. Take smelly cheese in France, where even small school children eat blue cheese at lunch or the fermented fish popular in Sweden (Surströmming is the most extreme example). I can’t even write about my decade-old memories of tasting it without wishing my desk came with a sick bag. Prescott said my response could have been triggered by a decades-old sensitivity to the smell of fish.
“My own horror is the strong ammonia-like odours that you sometimes find with fermented foods,” he said.
Dr James Hayes, an engineer at the air-quality consulting firm Air Environment, specialises in managing bad smells, and also has worked with research about cadaver-detection dogs. He says olfactory memories, as opposed to visual or verbal memories, are the strongest and most enduring that humans have.
“There’s good evidence to point to these memories developing in the womb and continuing from there,” says Hayes, who formerly worked at UNSW’s Air Quality and Odour Research Laboratory. “For example, I would wager most people remember their first strawberries.”
(I remember throwing up after gorging on a blissful strawberry sponge cake when I was about four years of age. It put me off strawberries for decades.)
Hayes said fish should never be microwaved in the office because heat spreads the odours, which are scientifically known as volatile organic compounds. Some tinned fish includes sulfur compounds, to which humans instinctually respond, he says.
Olfactory detection varies – good, bad and average, and according to the specific odour. “Your olfactory processing recognise the ‘importance’ of those particular odours for you,” Hayes says.
My sharp nose is not the greatest thing to live with. I can smell the water in vases going off, the socks left next to the other side of the bed that ripen overnight, milk on the turn.
It makes me sad. There are some very lovely people who enjoy tinned tuna for lunch. I would love to join them. I can’t. It is not you. It is your volatile compounds.
Julie Power is a senior reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald.
Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.
