Desktop dining on the rise

For 11 years, June Jo Lee, an ethnog rapher, has been talking to people about how they eat. She has often been in offices, observing whitecollar workers. A 20-something administrative assistant at an architecture firm in Seattle told her, "I don't think I ate at a table at all this week if you don't include my desk at work.'' In Chicago, Lee talked to an IT specialist who lunched in front of his computer and assiduously avoided the break room; anyone who ate in there was odd.

Schooled in anthropology, Lee works for the Hartman Group, a consulting firm. She helps clients like Kraft Foods, PepsiCo, Nestle, Whole Foods Market and Google better understand how people think about and consume food so they can repackage products and design new ones, find novel distribution methods or keep their own employees productive and well fed. After all her analysis, Lee says, "The way people eat at work is pretty sad.'' In the 1987 movie `Wall Street', Gordon Gekko remarks, "Lunch is for wimps.'' It has proved to be a prescient line in the workplace, where taking time off for lunch has become a sign of idleness. Breaking for a midday meal might have made more sense when laborers toiled with their bodies on tasks that required rest and refueling. But in an economy where the stand ard task is sitting in front of a computer, lunch is less intuitive and more optional.

Now some 62% of professionals say they typically eat lunch at their desks, a phenomenon that social scientists have begun calling "desktop dining''. Eating takes a back seat to meetings, catching up on to-dos or responding to email. Roughly half of American adults eat lunch alone.

There is a possible health benefit to all of this: Our unaccompanied lunches are probably smaller. Studies on pigs, rats, puppies, chickens and other animals dating back to the 1920s show a phenomenon researchers call `social facilitation', in which the presence of others makes an individual eat more. For years, scientists believed humans were different. Animals feed, they thought; humans dine. In subsequent research, it turned out that humans feed, too. Simply eating with one other person increases the average amount ingested by 44%. In fact, the more people present, the more people eat. And with the clearly delineated lunch on the decline, workers end up snacking.

Beyond any health risks, the desk lunch detracts from our sense of the office as a collaborative, innovative, sociable space. Brian Wansink, a professor and the director of Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab, points out that desktop dining isn't even a sign of industriousness anymore; these days, a desk luncher is as likely as not to be scrolling through Facebook. "Workplace satisfaction is so much higher if you eat with your colleagues,'' Wansink told me. "You like your job more -and you like your colleagues better.'