Front-paged at the NYT: How to eat lunch at your "luxurious" company.

In case this has never occurred to you, snack items can be lunch.

Inside, the article is "How to Make Meals From Office Snacks/At start-ups and luxurious companies, the free lunch is for the taking, if you’re bold enough." I look forward to more NYT articles about things that are "free... for the taking, if you’re bold enough."

How to Stock Your Home Office... supplies are free, if you're bold enough! 

For Shoppers at Department Stores: The clothes and makeup you need for your big date are free for the taking, if you're bold enough. 

For Diners at Middling Restaurants: Your home supply of sugar and ketchup is free, if you're bold enough.

Oh, now, I'm going too far! The NYT is talking about the conditions at "start-ups and luxurious companies." It's okay to take advantage of them, just like it's okay — even a great idea — to tax the rich to pay for things you want for the poor. Well, the workers at start-ups and luxurious companies aren't exactly poor, but they are young and hip and — I'm sure — socialist. So it's not petty theft or bad faith. It's cool, cool enough to be front-paged in the NYT.

Now, why do we need a 2,000-word article about how to grab office snacks for lunch. Is it about the moral question? The legal details? Is it about the office culture — what other employees and your superiors think of the worker who raids the shared snacks to assemble a meal? Is it about the nutritional details of a fruit and cheese (and whether Steve Jobs sort of died of being a fruitatarian)?

It's about the cuisine — the "scrappy new cuisine." And the makers of this new cuisine are stepping up to preen about it and the NYT is printing their names:

“I literally never go out and buy lunch,” said Rebecca Jennings, a culture reporter at Vox Media.... Her signature dish? The personal “work pizza,” which makes use of complimentary bread, sriracha and Babybel. Jennings bakes these ingredients in the toaster oven for about four and a half minutes, until the cheese begins to brown. After that, she adds a special touch. “We have this drawer that I don’t think a lot of the people at the office know about, with leftover Parmesan cheese packets from when big teams order pizza,” she said. “I’ll sprinkle that on top.”

They know now! And what do they think of you? The NYT doesn't seem to have asked anyone. They present Jennings's pridefulness as if everyone will admire her for her ingeniousness and her can-do spirit. There's no one to say she's using too much of the best items or that she's stinking up the place cooking cheeses that they'd only presume to eat cold.

No, it's on to the next person whose snacking gets called not only "lunch" but "cuisine." It's "Kira Fisher, who has worked for several social media companies, including Tumblr...." Wait. Are Vox and Tumblr "luxurious companies"? They're not "startups," are they? Aren't media companies struggling these days?

“One thing I really like to do is make a cheese plate,” [Fisher] said. “Getting all the fruit we have in the office and cutting it — cutting the apples, having grapes, finding whatever cheese they have — and making a little spread, a little office mezze platter.”

Having grapes?  Based on the photograph, I think they meant "halving grapes." And did she really cut  grapes apples with that little plastic knife? This lady is munching on fruit and cheese and taking enough to feel all right without more. But she's calling it "a little office mezze platter." So that makes it cuisine... or bullshit. Take your pick. And maybe it is what media companies deserve. Why is Kira Fisher working at Tumblr? She got her start at "the food blog Sad Desk Lunch, where she cataloged user-submitted photos of bleak workday meals."

Elsewhere online, lists of so-called “D.I.Y. office snacks” and “office snack hacks” recommend unofficial uses of office kitchen appliances, such as using a Keurig coffee maker to cook ramen. 

And the point there was humor. Office snack lunches are depressing. But the NYT is presenting this as a jaunty lifestyle.

According to Ms. Fisher, the great challenge of office cooking is overcoming the sweetness of snack food. She sometimes makes yogurt feel more lunch-like by adding a handful of crushed-up potato chips, or a salty “new wave snack” like Biena roasted chickpeas.

Is that an embedded ad for Biena? Here, buy some of that "new wave snack" through my Amazon portal. You can pay $1 an ounce for chickpeas — or let your "luxurious" company pay — and feel free to put them on yogurt (in your heroic struggle to overcome the sweetness).

A "sales manager" named Michael Sztanski is quoted enthusing about "a make-your-own-bowl-type thing":

“I’ll take the hard-boiled eggs and chop them up to make egg salad with mayo, pepper and salt. That’ll be one part of the bowl. Then I’ll crush up Doritos, or any chip — most recently, I’ve been using Sun Chips. I’ll crush them up as another part of the bowl. Then I get mozzarella balls, which I’ll throw in there as well. And a jerky stick.” 

I'm doing a make-your-own-blog-post-type thing, and yet I will pass on Sztanski's jerky stick.

The NYT does get to some other issues. There are a few words about nutrition. There's taxation: Employers have been deducting the cost of snacks, and it hasn't been taxed as income to the employees. Then there's the question whether you could "get fired for abusing workplace food privileges." A lawprof is quoting speculating that "maybe the employer is going to start saying that this is a crime, like embezzlement or theft." And Jennings is quoted feeling "embarrassment." But:

She probably should not be concerned. “Vox Media’s office cafes make for great spots to gather, have serendipitous run-ins and host creative brainstorms,” a spokeswoman for the company wrote in an email. “It’s no surprise our employees have grown as clever with the snacks as we are with our work.”

That's the right answer for PR and tax purposes. And I believe it, actually. The company is keeping you on campus and basically still working. I've worked in places that serve outright lunches, and it was obvious that the point was to keep you on site and in work mode.

Ah! Finally, we get to "the ethics of snacks." A philosophy professor is consulted:

“Are they an unpaid intern or an underpaid employee suffering from broader social injustices?” [Brookes Brown, an assistant professor of philosophy at Clemson University]. “Or are they the C.E.O. who wants to make a higher rung on the Forbes wealthiest people list?”

I'd like a little detail on the philosophy of that. What is the ethical principle that authorizes readjusting your pay? What's the point of talking to a philosophy professor if you're going to get an answer that sounds like the first thing an employee caught stealing would blurt out?!

There's a second philosophy professor:

“It definitely matters whether the snacks show up in an endless supply or whether there’s a limited amount put out each day,” said Karen Stohr, an associate professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. “The 17th-century British philosopher John Locke put this in terms of an obligation to leave ‘enough, and as good’ for other people,” she said. “That seems to apply to employer-provided snacks.”

That's the Lockean proviso. Read about it here. Locke was talking about taking land from the natural world and making it private property, so I think you need to do some philosophizing to get from nature to an employer and from a human being working on land to an employee eating snacks, but — what the hell? — the article is getting long, we were just pausing to snack on philosophy, and it's time to get back to Kira Fisher. She says the snacks at Vox Media "are restocked daily."

“There’s always plenty left over, so I don’t feel bad at all,” she said. “But if you are the type to go in really early in the morning and take all of the most desired thing, like the cups of guacamole or the hard-boiled eggs, that’s extremely un-chill.”

And that's how it ends, with imagining somebody else who's doing the same thing but they're doing more, and when you think about them, they seem gross. They're un-chill. Hey, Kira, look at Michael, he's taking the hard-boiled eggs and chopping them up with mayonnaise to make egg salad as one part of a bowl and then crushing up Doritos. Should he be ashamed?