NEED TO KNOW
Lauren Wall brought homemade chicken thighs on a flight, but the meal turned into a viral debate about airplane etiquette
A fellow passenger loudly complained about the smell in a clip she shared herself on social media
Wall defended her meal, saying it was a personal milestone in prioritizing her well-being over others’ opinions
One night after work, Lauren Wall was rushing out the door in order to catch her flight to Atlanta. The 28-year-old Florida resident knew the trip would be around dinner time, so she debated what she wanted to eat.
“I could grab something from the airport, but I didn’t know if I was gonna have time,” Wall tells PEOPLE. “So, rather than grabbing fast food or whatever they have, I just packed up some leftovers.”
After rushing through security and boarding the plane, Wall settled in her seat before breaking out her meal. “When they brought out the drink carts and started giving out snacks, I was like, ‘Okay, this seems like a reasonable time to eat,’” she recalls. Wall says she even turned to her seatmate to double-check it was okay, and says her fellow passenger joked, “Only if I get a bite.”
Credit: Lauren Wall
But as Wall snacked on her “two chicken thighs,” she noticed a different male passenger sitting in front of her turn to his travel companion with distaste. “He just turned to her and was like, ‘It stinks.’ And he said it super loud,” Wall claims. “I was just sitting there with it on my fork.”
After Wall heard the comment, she grabbed her phone to share the experience with her followers on social media.
“Me facing my fears,” Wall wrote in the onscreen caption of a May 15 TikTok. “Eating chicken thighs on the plane and a man eating cheezits in front of me screaming ‘IT STINKS’ but I finished them in peace [because] the way I feel in my body is more important than some random guy’s uncomfortability with salt, pepper & garlic.”
But the video was quickly flooded with comments calling her meal “selfish.”
“The way you feel is 100% not more important than being considerate to those around you,” writes one user.
“People can wear ear plugs or put [on] a sleep mask but smell is the only sense you can’t cover up or ignore,” one comment with over 28,000 likes says. “Be considerate.”
Another put it simply: “We used to call this being selfish.”
Others came to the traveler’s defense. One said, “These comments are wild and not what I expected. I get like tuna or something but chicken is very mild??”
“It was just a baked chicken thigh. It has salt, pepper and garlic powder on it,” Wall tells PEOPLE. “I prep that every single week. That’s a meal that I eat regularly.”
The part-time health and wellness coach says it was “really interesting to see the dichotomy” of responses, but stands behind her decision to keep eating.
“All I know is that this was a huge step for me in my growth of being able to stick to what makes me feel good knowing that it’s not gonna make everybody the happiest,” the self-described “recovering” people pleaser says.
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“It’s not like I’m sitting in my kitchen with 10 hours of free time being like, ‘I’m gonna load up the garlic so that this man can feel it.’ Like absolutely not. That’s not the story at all,” Wall says. “I think that is the story a lot of people decided to make me the villain in, which is okay because they don’t know me.”
She adds: “Hopefully it reached the right people who are kind of afraid of doing something a little bit different, maybe bringing their own food to a restaurant with friends or not drinking if they don’t want to drink when they’re going out in social situations.”
“It can feel uncomfortable when it feels like you’re doing it differently than the vast majority of the world,” she adds.
Read the original article on People
Dining and Cooking