Indigestion of the Day
Canteen chef's take exceptional pride in their work
A long, long time ago, in a bank not too far away from here, I learnt a very important lesson in surviving in the corporate jungle: don’t eat anything that’s brightly coloured in the canteen. As in nature, bright colours are usually an indication of danger, meant to ward off potential predators. In the canteen, it’s meant to lure poor, innocent graduates who’ve left their lunch at home or single people who subsist on canteen food by day and cereal by night. Several indigestion pills later, I simplified this lesson to: do not eat anything from the canteen!
Now, some of you may be aware of my general distaste for the canteen and the “food” they serve (and by “serve” I mean “begrudgingly slop into your plate”). Seeing that I went to an all boys’ school, I used to have fairly low standards when it came to lunch. At school, Alan Farber’s Matzo bread was considered exotic; toasted chicken mayonnaise sandwiches with real chicken was luxurious and half an orange would be enough to sustain you for the taxing second half of a soccer match. Once I started working, I realised it isn’t unreasonable to insist that food be cooked, warm and not drenched in sauce to make it palatable. Sushi being the notable exception.
My bad canteen experiences began in my first year as a management consultant, working at a large gold refinery on Johannesburg’s East Rand (there’s only one, so I don’t know why I’m even trying to mask their identity). Heading to the canteen one afternoon, I met the CEO walking swiftly and nervously in the opposite direction – he advised me not to have the chicken a la king. An hour later twelve people were hospitalised for food poisoning!
This experience was followed through the years by the unusual combination of battered fish and cauliflower, a Greek salad without the feta and olives but with jalapenos (don’t ask) and a chicken schnitzel smothered in a cheese sauce that was as lumpy as Roseanne Barr’s thighs. Please feel free to hurl into a paper bag at this point in time. I’ve had fish so oily, you could wring the excess oil out and use it to fry the chips that accompanied it. Then there was the pizza with hard boiled egg on it (to be fair, this was in Switzerland). And let’s not forget the lasagne that had so much white sauce in it, the ANC objected.
As a result, here are some important guidelines when next dining at your company’s canteen:
- If you can’t physically identify the food or even the food group then you probably shouldn’t be eating it.
- “Catch of the Day” was really caught in the canteen storeroom earlier that day
- “Soup of the Day” is really “Soup of the Month”
- Make sure the meatballs are meatballs and aren’t meatballs minus the meat… if you know what I mean…
- The “Health” or “Lifestyle” sections usually aren’t… unless of course coronary heart disease is a lifestyle
- “Freshly Baked” means “Freshly Microwaved”
- Steak on Monday is beef stir fry on Tuesday is spaghetti bolognaise on Wednesday is meatballs on Thursday
- Don’t under any circumstances have anything on the menu that has the word “budget” in it!
If you think of any more, please let me know at diary@jeetesh.net. Otherwise, join me for a bite at the canteen tomorrow. Bring your own, of course.
