Time to have your cake and eat it at the office
08 Feb 2023
Do you bring cake into the office?
Perhaps you like to celebrate your birthday by sharing something tasty with your colleagues – or even bring in a special bake to try to impress a certain someone on Valentine’s Day.
There’s a long tradition in the UK of people taking treats into the office to share with workmates to help boost morale and team spirit.
But now one health chief has likened the bringing in of cakes to passive smoking – and suggested we should take office cakes well and truly off the menu.
Professor Susan Jebb, chairwoman of the Food Standards Agency, told The Times: “If nobody brought in cakes into the office, I would not eat cakes in the day – but because people do bring cakes in, I eat them.
“Now, okay, I have made a choice, but people were making a choice to go into a smoky pub.
“With smoking, after a very long time, we have got to a place where we understand that individuals have to make some effort but that we can make their efforts more successful by having a supportive environment.
“But we still don’t feel like that about food.”
She said that passive smoking inflicted harm on others ‘and exactly the same is true of food’.
Now the Professor has a point: There is no doubt that people are tempted to eat treats in the office because they have been brought in for them when otherwise they might give them a wide berth.
But she’s wide of the mark when she compares it to passive smoking, which anyone in the vicinity of a workplace smoker was forced to do whether they like it or not.
It’s up to each of us to decide whether we grab a slice of the Victoria Sponge that nice young man from sales has brought in – which certainly wasn’t the case when it came to breathing in the cigar smoke from the colleague sitting next to us as he lit up for the third time that day.
And of course, there is much more to the tradition of bringing in cake than just satisfying our cravings.
There is no doubt that sharing treats – particularly home-made ones – is a great way of building team spirit and co-operation amongst a workforce and of breaking the ice when new recruits join.
It’s also a good way of people getting to know each other’s different cultures. In a modern, diverse office, it’s likely you’ll encounter a far greater range of treats over the course of a year than you might have 50 years ago – and get an insight into the different cultures which create them at the same time.
And if you think that’s not a point to take seriously, just look at how the Chicken Tikka Masala Balti has grown to be the nation’s most popular dish, and the way it has helped create a little more understanding of Indian culture as a result.
Even our own Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, accepts that a bit of cake is good for us from time to time.
“The Prime Minister believes that personal choice should be baked into our approach,” his official spokesman said.
“We want to encourage healthy lifestyles and are taking action to tackle obesity, which has cost the NHS [National Health Service] £6 billion annually.
“However, the way to deal with this issue is not to stop people from occasionally bringing in treats for their co-workers.”
We couldn’t agree more Prime Minister. That’s why our message to anyone thinking of bringing a treat to the office for a special event is: Let them eat cake.
