“You could basically devote a whole chapter to biscuits,” my friend Gurdeep Loyal laughs, when I tell him I’m writing about the importance of food and drink to working relationships. Neither I nor Loyal, a food, drink and hospitality consultant, trends expert and author, have colleagues anymore – we’re both freelance – but we have between us spent 20 years observing workplace dynamics, and how food and drink play a part. We have bonded with countless teammates over biscuits: the chocolate digestives or, better still, chocolate Hobnobs over which you can strike up a conversation with even your most tiresome colleague; the one with whom you share nothing but a preference for dark chocolate. “You don’t choose your colleagues any more than you choose your family, but food becomes a way of feeling empathy with a person,” Loyal continues. Even if you have nothing in common at all, you can probably bond over a tub of M&S flapjacks.

The flapjacks say relax. They say let’s lay down tools for a moment. “Food serves several functions, one of which is to give rhythm to your day,” says Loyal. “Breakfast, coffee, lunch, tea in the afternoon are the allotted pause points, which is why it’s so exciting when something happens outside of that.”

Unlike everything else in the office, food and drink represent not working – which is why it’s such a thrill when they appear outside mealtimes. The flapjacks, birthday cake, Hobnobs and holiday sweets remind everyone in a tangible way that we are first and foremost human beings, and that our need to eat eclipses our need to work. The lid comes off the cake tin, and work is off the table, permitting us to talk about something other than work for at least the five minutes it takes to demolish a slice.  

So far, so sweet – but why does this matter for your career? The answer is the clichéd, but correct, aphorism that it’s not what you know but who you know, and that the best place to get to know people is invariably eating and drinking with them. Even when the food and drink is generic and unworthy of comment – Pret sandwiches, Krispy Kremes, Celebrations – people find ways to express themselves through it. “You notice that person who puts crisps in their Pret sandwiches or doesn’t eat the crusts or only eats a certain filling or flavour,” says Loyal. 

Much is made of people’s willingness (or not) to get a round in, yet I think it is the nuances of food and drink which are such fertile grounds for connection. We may still be in the office. We may even be at our desks. Yet in the moments we are eating or drinking, we are liminal creatures, somewhere between work and home. We are neither entirely employees nor entirely ourselves.

Of course, there’s a limit to how revealing a preference for crayfish and rocket sandwiches can be, but as these observations accumulate – and our ability to respond to them – so the potential to make friends with our co-workers increases. There is care in saving a sandwich for someone, remembering their favourite filling, or ordering their latte with oat milk, not almond, when you’re getting a coffee round in. You don’t have to work in food to value making a cup of tea for your colleague and knowing as well if not better than their spouse how much milk they want. There is such intimacy to that knowledge, to being attuned to the rhythm of each other’s day even to the point of falling in sync around certain meals or drinks – be that a mid-morning cuppa, Thursday afternoon beers or Friday morning bacon butties to soothe the night before.

With about two-thirds of our daily meals eaten at work (and that’s without snacks or drinks), the opportunities to relate to colleagues through food are numerous – or they were, pre-pandemic. Before Covid, only around 12% of working adults reported working from home at some point during the week. Between January and February this year, that figure stood at 40% – and for all that employers might like to shift it, home working shows no sign of going away. This has its merits (as I’m sure you’ll know if you’re half-reading this on a Zoom call, pyjama bottoms still on) but it has drastically reduced our social time with colleagues. Either we’re hot desking, unsure who we’re going to be sitting with or who’s going to be in the office, or we’re working from home.

Were we not social creatures, this would have no consequence – and would, if anything, make us more productive. Yet research from Stanford’s Institute for Economic Policy and Research begs to differ. Their most recent and widely reported study found a 10-20% decrease in productivity among workers who are fully remote. People struggled to maintain motivation without the communal environment of an office, said researchers – and the absence of face-to-face interactions affects mentorship and networking opportunities. Foremost among the reasons cited was less efficient communication, thanks to the loss of non-verbal cues and spontaneous interactions that can lead to more effective collaboration and innovation in the workplace.

In short, they missed the kettle, the water-cooler, the box of Krispy Kremes – those physical points at which colleagues spontaneously interact with each other. Much was written during the course of Covid about the absence of ‘water cooler chat’, a catch-all term for conversation that happens in the office and over food and drink. In these liminal spaces, small talk can lead to bigger discussions which researchers have identified can result in colleagues helping each other to de-stress, or work through a problem. Mug by mug, original glazed by original glazed, biscuit by biscuit they build and cement friendships between colleagues – which leads to better staff retention long term. Indeed, so significant were these moments deemed, some companies tried to replicate them remotely using hastily invented apps called things like Water Cooler and Donut. They were largely unsuccessful. Such spontaneous moments of connection in areas of transition are, by definition, almost impossible to design.

Of course, the ritual of talking about food can continue over Zoom, and it does. There’s still the ‘what did you have for lunch, what are you having for dinner’ dance of pre-meeting small talk. But talking about bread is not the same as breaking it together and knowing who wants cheese, who wants ham and who wants their mayonnaise on the side.

The sharing element of food is vital; it is, as anthropologist Martin Jones observes, a hallmark of human intimacy. In his seminal book Feast: Why Humans Share Food, he observed that to any other species our practice of eating together – exposing our teeth, making direct eye contact, sharing food – would seem risky; but “at some point our own ancestors turned those danger signals around and transformed them into the very essence of conviviality that defines humanity”. Once necessary fuel, to fight for and over, food became a medium of communication and social bonding, he continues. “We now use the shared meal to punctuate the day, celebrate the great occasions of life, make transactions and define who is inside and outside any particular cultural group.”

Or at least, we used to – and in many European countries they still do. The idea of eating ‘al desko’ is beyond the comprehension of anyone I’ve spoken to from Scandinavia, France or Spain, where even the concept of a sandwich was met with genuine horror. There, even the most mundane meetings demanded some pintxos, just as in most Swedish companies it is mandatory for all employees to sit down and have fika (which roughly translates as coffee, cake and chats). In Denmark, the concept of fællesskab, which is loosely the feeling of trust and togetherness, is inextricable with eating together. Then, of course, there is France, where the long business lunch is practically enshrined in their national psyche. 

Ah, the business lunch. Remember those? Let’s face it, few do if they’re not in finance/shipping/under 50. Yet while commonly derided and rarely welcomed, the business lunch works a magic that cannot be replicated without food and drink. “Food has a power dynamic at work that it doesn’t have elsewhere in your life,” Loyal observes. “If you are trying to strike a great deal or win new business over lunch, that is a very different dynamic to getting a load of Pret sandwiches in for the team.”

The latter is collective, designed to provide a common ground for connection and morale; the former is more of a negotiating tool, with potential for division as well as union. From choosing the wine to paying the bill, through navigating a possibly unfamiliar menu, each mouthful has the potential to reveal the nuances of the relationship between the two diners, and direct it. A restaurant-owner friend recently created a bidding war between five different publishers for a book from a relatively unknown author, simply by taking them all out for a fancy dinner and sending them home with the manuscript afterwards. He wasn’t an agent; if he had been, he’d have known the days of wining and dining prospective publishers are almost over. Yet the author was a friend of his, and my friend knew the power of good food and wine.

He knew that, ultimately, those who are well-fed will always be more amenable toward the feeder. He knew that the conversations are richer, the tangents more explorative, the criticisms more constructive and the compliments more fulsome in the presence of a decent meal. No matter the intention or action of the diners, the arrival of the bread, the presentation of the wine, the perusing of the menu all have the potential to create common ground or break and dispel any existing tension. The conversational thread sparked by some perfect chips could lead to a sensational deal, or it could simply end in dessert.

Sadly, I no longer have colleagues – but I have made many friends as a freelancer, for of course nowhere does food and drink feature in working relationships quite so much as in the food and drink industry. There are fast friendships between the owners of competing editors and PR firms, and between independent butchers, bakers and cheese retailers. You could argue this is just correlation or that the sort of people the food and drink industry attracts tend to be a sociable sort who readily form friendships. Yet it’s hard to believe the near-constant presence of food and drink doesn’t play a significant part.

When every meeting involves eating, or at least talking about eating, the uniting, pacifying and diverting joy of food is never far away. Food is our work – but it is first and foremost our life. Remembering and rejoicing in that is our job, and what makes our relationships thrive. In a working culture where food and drink are considered mere support acts for serious business matters, we forget the role they play in forging the connections that make business happen – whether that’s whispered gossip by the water cooler or loud declarations of support brought forth by oysters and three bottles of chenin blanc.  

This article is an adapted extract from Hungry Heart: A Story Of Food And Love by Clare Finney, published by Quarto. 

Images: Getty