Organisational Space and Beyond

9 Cake and the Open Plan Office

A Foodscape of Work Through a Lefebvrian Lens

Harriet Shortt

Appetizer: An Introduction to Food, Work, Space and Place

This chapter is about food and eating in the workplace. In fact, as I write I have opened a packet of biscuits and made a coffee and, perhaps, before you continue to read you might want to pause here, put the kettle on and open the biscuit tin.

It has been argued that eating is a necessary, mundane and routine activity (Sobal and Wonsink, 2007: 135) and this would indeed be a reasonable point of view if we considered food simply as a fuel with which to nourish our bodies—we need food and water to survive. Yet food can shape who we are, our lifestyle choices, our bodies, our identities (see Caplan, ...