A pet peeve of mine: The free food in the technology world seems to often be the worst possible food for you. User groups invariably have pizza, soda and beer. Food people bring into the office is invariably bagels, donuts, or some other kind of baked good.
Sure, these things are all delicious. They’re also all terrible for you. And they hurt productivity: That donut you ate at 9am is why you can’t concentrate at 10:30. Have some more coffee and defer your crash until after lunch. Great.
This bothers me on another level, too: Cheap junk food culture sits right alongside cheap junk code culture. If we can’t muster long term thought about our own food, we’re not likely to do it with respect to our code or our businesses, either.
(PS: Should I not complain about the food, because it’s free? Perhaps. But the free aspect of it is beside the point from my perspective. The appeal of this food for me is usually the convenience — that I won’t have to think about feeding myself for the evening as part of deciding whether I can go to a user group meeting.)
