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Office Food: Cookies And Brownies And Cake, Oh My!
By: Kelly Martin
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At the WOUB Public Media offices we’ve often joked that if someone wanted to kill off the entire staff all they’d have to do is leave some laced brownies in the lunchroom. It would take us all down by the end of the day.
Like most office staffs, we like to eat.
If you’ve spent any time in a media organization, you know that food comes second only to our other vice – coffee.
The days working in media can be long and the nights even longer – and they often blend together during election time and special shows or projects. And some media folk’s days and nights feel the same because their shifts begin WAY before the sun rises (ask morning announcer Chris Riddle).
So it becomes the perfect place to bring your unwanted food – food that you have leftover from a party or holiday and is somtimes the place where your unwanted food goes right before the trash can. It doesn’t mean the food isn’t any good – it just means that you know you won’t finish it or in my case – my family is too picky to eat it.
I can’t tell you the number of times my husband has said “take this to work with you tomorrow, those people will eat anything.”
You never know what you might find. It could be brownies or leftover cake – or maybe some day-old donuts.
On a really good day a co-worker will find someone who is trying to unload Girl Scout cookies cheap and buys boxes and boxes of your favorite (somewhat melted) GS cookies – just to be kind.
OH, that’s a very fine day.
I’ve brought in plenty of things: a cake that I know my family won’t finish or bread out of some too ripe bananas that I hate to see go unused. Unfortunately, my family isn’t a huge fan of banana bread (told you they were picky) so I’ll bring it all in to work with me.
I recently brought in a slightly used giant Snicker bar, given to me by my mother (who constantly dumps her old food on me). So I’m not just dumping my own food, I’m also dumping my mom’s.
Occasionally some [crazy] person will leave some fruit or organic treats. At times there’ll be a half-eaten bag of chips or some exotic food from a foreign travel. In the summer months someone’s over-producing garden always provides plenty of homegrown goods (a lot of zucchini and squash) that will end up on someone’s dinner table.
Within a few hours it will be gone.
God bless college students. Living off of meager budgets, they’ll jump on the chance for any food that isn’t packaged in a Ramen noodle wrapper.
They will truly eat anything.
If you really want to unload something quickly, the newsroom is your best bet. That’s where the hungry students will pounce first – and they aren’t picky.
Because of previous work experiences, I know this happens in offices everywhere.
In some offices, there’s that ONE person that wants to ‘showcase’ their culinary skills. They love spending their evenings cooking away so that everyone could rave the next day about their latest creation.
Sometimes that person doesn’t have the culinary skills they think they do and you get the same dried out pepperoni rolls over and over….
But, hey, beggars can’t be choosers, right?