Eating at your desk is "disgusting"
Are you guilty of the "disgusting" habit of having lunch at your desk?
Eating ‘al desko’
Anna Soubry, the minister for public health, said in January 2013 that “it’s disgusting [to eat] over a keyboard,” and that lunch time should be a time to “chill out, get your head back together, and enjoy what you are eating”.
Miss Soubry also claimed that Britain has a “weird” relationship with food and that it’s “mad and wrong” not to pay employees for their lunch break. According to a report in The Telegraph, she also said that it was “sad” how many children started primary school not knowing how to use a knife and fork, because they were so used to eating TV dinners with their fingers.
All members of the lovefood team are guilty of eating at their desks… indeed, I’ve just finished my cheese salad. We don’t enjoy it, but work load, inhospitable weather outside, or wanting to read the papers online over lunch makes us do it. Sometimes I’ll get to the end of a day and realise that I haven’t left my chair for eight hours, bar the necessary pit stops.
Team lovemoney are guilty too, and Editor John shared the most disgusting ‘al desko’ story with me. One of his ex-colleagues (and bear in mind this a man who used to have a pint of milk and a samosa for breakfast every day) once spilt soup all over his keyboard… instead of cleaning it up, he tipped the keyboard upside down, and poured the infected soup back into his mouth. *Shiver*.
Would you touch a toilet?
What makes it worse are startling facts about keyboards. Apparently there are 200 times more bacteria on a keyboard (the same goes for mobile phones and TV remote controls) than there are on a toilet seat… that’s hundreds of thousands of germs, all within reach of QWERTY. In 2008, consumer group Which? tested its London office keyboards and found bugs that could cause food poisoning; in fact, one of the keyboards was so dirty that a microbiologist had it removed, quarantined and cleaned.
Allow me to take a short break, while I scrub this keyboard to within an inch of its life…
Do you eat at your desk?
…done. Back to the point: what do you think about eating at your desk? If you don’t hover over the keyboard when eating your sausage roll, and you clean up after yourself, is it really so different from eating at a table? Let us know your views by voting in the poll below:
This is a classic lovefood article.
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