It is a sad fact of office life that the high point of the working day, second only to the utterly glorious bit where you get to go home, is lunch. Somehow a morning of meetings and pointless paperwork can seem almost worth it for a few minutes alone with your Tupperware, quietly going through your ex’s tasteless wedding photos – until a box of fried chicken or a Lean Cuisine curry wafts past, spoiling your gastronomic moment with the all-pervading scent of complete and unabashed rudeness. Eating smelly food at your desk is tantamount to sticking two greasy fingers up at your co-workers – and then wiping them clean on their mouse mats.
Two-thirds of Britons now eat our lunches “al desko” (a phrase that makes this statistic all the more depressing, somehow) most days of the week and, according to a recent survey for the interior landscaping firm Ambius (which may, I suspect, have an interest in redesigning our working environment), half of office workers judge colleagues who choose particularly aromatic food as antisocial. It’s hard not to see this as having a negative effect on productivity – if you’re still boiling with rage at someone for that sardine curry, you’re hardly going to bust a gut to meet their sales targets for the afternoon, or go the extra mile to help them out on an urgent project.
Caroline Craig and Sophie Missing, authors of the definitive guide to the office feast, the Little Book of Lunch, agree smelly food is a problem: “In every office, there is always at least one employee who flouts the staffroom etiquette and microwaves something so pungent, it permeates the whole building’s vents for hours.” However, they acknowledge that sometimes smelly packed lunches are unavoidable – “so if you’ve got smoked haddock chowder to heat up, then for God’s sake do it quickly, then eat it outside on a park bench”.
Not all foods are created equally offensive, of course; hot food smells more strongly, and smelly food that you can hear being slurped or crunched supplies a double whammy of queasy irritation. So where does your lunch come in the hierarachy of shame?
Hot, smelly, noisy food
The worst. Even if you close your eyes and breathe through your mouth, you can still hear this lot being consumed through the simmering sound of your own rage. Enjoy only if you’re planning to resign in the next half hour: onion soup (slurp), cheesy chilli nachos (crunch), instant noodles (ugh), garlic bread (basically a P45 in baguette form).
Hot, smelly food
Heat causes molecules in food to move around faster, which means more of them will reach your nose. Best consumed outside in a wide open space: curry of any variety, any brassicas (school dinner alert), fast food, fish, particularly oily fish such as kippers, which could land you in a tribunal.
Smelly, noisy food
Enjoy with the window wide open, and only if your deskmate is listening to loud metal over headphones: cheese and onion crisps, crusty tuna rolls, any hipster sandwiches containing kimchi.
Smelly food
Best saved for when the rest of your team has popped to the shops: tuna salad, ripe brie sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, tinned fish.
Noisy food
Eat when your deskmate is busy on the phone: apples, carrot sticks, ready-salted crisps, nuts, crunchy salads.
Acceptable office food
Eat as much as you like, when you like: chocolate bars, yoghurt, cucumber sandwiches.
