Lunch looters: Why do colleagues steal food from the office fridge?

No sandwich is safe, no pasta not in peril when that one colleague at work decides to feed themselves - with your food from the communal fridge. Here’s how to deal with it.

Bringing your own lunch to work is a great way to save dosh, keep those healthy-eating goals on track and enjoy a side-serve of smug satisfaction as you watch your woefully unprepared colleagues agonising over which lunchtime queue they should join when 12:30pm rolls around.

But that self-satisfied little smile gets wiped off your face pretty darn quick when you head to the office fridge and find that someone has swiped your Tupperware tub of last night’s lasagne.

Oof. Hurts, doesn’t it? There’s the slow, dawning realisation. Then the shock. And then – rage. Pure, unadulterated rage. Someone has had the absolute gall to just come swanning into the kitchen for a poke around, taken a look at your food and thought, “I’ll be having that”. Sure, compliments to the chef and all, but seriously – this is theft, plain and simple.

And it’s no isolated incident, either. Work lunch theft happens all the time.

Work lunch theft happens all the time.

A quick call-out to my Facebook network on the topic was met with a torrent of impassioned responses from outraged victims. And I’m usually lucky to get a couple of likes (although admittedly, I mostly just post photos of my cat).

But despite my best efforts and sworn oaths to secrecy, I was unable to lure any lunch looters out of hiding to explain their actions.

So this leaves us with the following questions to answer, on our own initiative and on an empty stomach: who are these people? Why do they do it? And where is my lasagne?

Related story: Is there ever a good way to tell someone they have food stuck in their teeth?

So this leaves us with the following questions: Who are these people? Why do they do it? And where is my lasagne?

Bold as brass

It’s the level of audacity to lunch theft that makes it so difficult for non-lunch-stealers to understand. These reprobates come to work every day at the same office, with the same people, and somehow, they have no qualms about swiping Jen from payroll’s stir-fry, or Rob from IT’s tuna salad. Hell, they probably even say hi to them in the hall later.

Therefore, a key clue to a lunch thief’s character is that they’re a fairly shameless type of individual. You’d have to be pretty darn brazen to waltz out of a 5000m2 open-plan office with an entire Messina trifle, as someone recently did here at delicious. HQ. Other cuisine crooks aim even higher – a flight attendant friend tells me of how four days’ worth of meals and snacks she had meticulously packed for a work trip were stolen from the galley bench of an aircraft. Try finding room for that in the overhead lockers.

As to why these people pinch your lunch? Because they can. They laugh in the face of your passive-aggressive “PLEASE DO NOT STEAL” post-it note. In fact, they probably use it as a napkin.

Simply irresistible

Of course, not all kitchen bandits are entirely lacking in the human decency department. Sometimes, they’re considerate enough to only help themselves to a little taste. Take the now infamous cookie dough that was being saved in the delicious. office fridge. Rather than nicking the whole thing, our thoughtful thief merely scraped out a handful, leaving the rest – and their fingernail marks – behind. Also making the delicious. hall of infamy is a certain batch of leftover KFC chicken. Here, our scrounging scoundrel clearly felt that nicking a whole piece was just too low. So they only ate the batter, graciously leaving all the chicken for the lucky owner.

This offers another key clue: that sometimes, office fridge raiders just have a really bad problem with impulse control. They see something and they frankly cannot resist. (Perhaps we should add that food hygiene is also not high on their list of priorities.)

Office fridge raiders may just have a really bad problem with impulse control.

The bottom line

Of course, we have to take into account that some people are genuinely hungry, and can’t afford to pay for their own lunch. With a cost-of-living crisis making us all pull those purse strings ever tighter, this is a reality for more Australians than ever before. So if this is you, please don’t feel you have to resort to stealing. Reach out and ask for help. There are good people out there. Folks who steal trifles and lasagnes are just not among them.

Of course, not all kitchen bandits are entirely lacking in the human decency department. Sometimes, they’re considerate enough to only help themselves to a little taste.

As for the anonymous lunch thief in your own workplace? Until someone finally nabs them (and they will), there really is nothing much you can do about it. People who don’t care will continue to not care, and people who can’t control themselves will continue to scrape the skin off your fried chicken when you’re not looking. But I hope that this highly scientific analysis of the issue has helped you whittle down your list of suspects *narrows eyes as every second person walks past*.

Until justice (and lunch) is served, you’ll simply have to hope for the best. Or just bring salad to work every day. No one is going to steal that.

Related story: Is it ever okay to reheat fish in an office kitchen? We take the bait

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Originally published as Lunch looters: Why do colleagues steal food from the office fridge?