Rituals Roadmap: The Human Way to Transform Everyday Routines into Workplace Magic

CHAPTER FOUR

EATINGS

Rituals for the Most Important Meal of the Day:The One We Share

In my favorite research study of all time, the one that inspired the name of my business—the Spaghetti Project—and a new direction in my career, four professors from the Cornell School of Management studied “organizational benefits that firms might obtain through various supports for coworkers to engage in commensality (i.e., eating together).”¹ The professors were inspired to do this research because they saw “that the costs for sponsoring workplace eating—whether . . . for facilities and/or food—[were] clear and easily measured” yet “popular debates about ...