Should we ban cake at work, like they do in childcare?

WHEN Ginger took a cake to childcare for her daughter’s birthday it was rejected. Their reasons seemed fair enough, but now the ‘no cake rule’ is coming to workplaces.

Mmmm cake. Should we really be banning it at work for the sake of our waistlines?

FOR my daughter’s fourth birthday, Kitty wanted to help me bake a cake, put pink icing on it and take it to daycare to share with her friends.

We baked the cake and took it along to the childcare centre and came smack up against the new NO CAKE rule.

Daycare staff told us to pop the cake in the fridge and take the uneaten vanilla sponge home again at the end of the day.

Against all odds, Kitty did not have a meltdown when this was explained to her. Still, it did feel like a bad parenting moment.

This unfortunate chain of events was entirely my fault. I’d neglected to read several daycare newsletters stating the rule was implemented because “many children have allergies and intolerances that excludes them from participating in the eating of cake.”

OK, it makes sense if we can’t bring cake to daycare because kids have allergies. But banning it at work because we’re all a bit fat might be one step too far. Picture: Stephen Laffer

Fair enough. However, some Australian workplaces are also implementing no cake rules and allergies are not the reason. Health professionals are worried that office cake eating is damaging our teeth and waistlines.

Dr Melanie Pescud is an office cake expert. Obviously that’s not her real title. She’s actually a health policy expert from the ANU’s School of Regulation and Global Governance.

While Dr Pescud does enjoy an occasional slice of cake herself, she’s worried about how much unhealthy food we are consuming at work.

“The weekly morning tea involving cake means that employees are consuming yet another discretionary food, when we are already as a population, are consuming too much.

“Over a year, with all those morning and afternoon teas, this could equate to perhaps around 50 pieces of cake, if not more. That’s a lot!” she says.

Compared to other world events, eating cake at work may seem trivial. The interesting thing though, is that people really care about this and debate can get pretty heated.

Mum and fitness instructor Liz, for example, firmly believes banning cake at work is excessive.

“We live in an environment flooded with highly processed foods and we need to learn how to make healthy food choices within that context. To me, cake is a positive part of celebrating,” she says.

Canberra-based ABC radio presenter Lish Fejer loves cake and takes the pro-cake arguments one step further.

“I’ve based my whole working career and camaraderie around bringing a cake to work.

“I don’t bring a cake every day but for a special occasion [such as] a birthday or retirement,” she says.

Canberra radio presenter Lish Fejer regularly brings cake into work.

All Ms Fejer’s cakes are home made with love. In her own words, “the finest cake baked with love and served to make someone else’s day.”

Ms Fejer is a trained science communicator and has made numerous cakes which pop, move and explode — and even met her husband this way.

At a friend’s birthday party she was firing a scone out of a cannon at 100km/hour.

“It hit a wall and shattered,” Ms Fejer says, and meanwhile “there was a lovely engineering lad in the crowd who found the whole girl-with-cake cannon thing pretty smokin’ hot — in a sort of Charlie’s Angels meets the CWA sort of way.”

Ahem. Don’t try this at home. Or at work.

Back on the topic of office cake, and at this point, I need to come clean. I’m not neutral on the topic of cake. Last year my nostalgic cake obsession led me to kick start a huge cake off to raise money for charity.

The issue is that I’m fat as the next person. My dress size keeps going up. Dr Psecud suggests our expanding waistlines are the very reason cake is such an issue.

“Over 60 per cent of adults are overweight or obese and around a quarter of kids, so perhaps some restrictions are not an over-reaction.

“I’m not advocating for a total ban, but definitely the implementation of some guidelines around restricting the frequency of unhealthy foods coupled with promotion of healthier foods would be a good start.”

Last year Dr Pescud did research into whether it was viable for workplaces to swap out unhealthy options for fruit.

“Basically, if free fruit is provided in the workplace it will be eaten, there is a demand for it. Employees are often grateful for a healthy alternative,” she says.

However that’s not the end of the story.

“Healthy food provision isn’t enough, we need comprehensive strategies to support employees to be able to make the healthy choice the easy choice,” Dr Pescud says.

Well that’s food for thought. And in the meantime if you need a good belly chuckle, check out the Cake Wrecks blog. You will not be sorry (and may find yourself still on there hours later — don’t say you weren’t warned).

Ginger Gorman is an award winning print and radio journalist, and a 2016 TEDx Canberra speaker. Follow her on Twitter @GingerGorman