This week's episode of The Sporkful podcast is up! Listen through the player and subscribe in iTunes.
My friend Mike Pesca, who hosts at The Gist podcast, heard about The Sporkful's series on office eating and invited me to Slate's office kitchen to help him optimize his lunch strategy.
It was a powerfully delicious experience:
"I can't wait to have my warm turkey," Mike declares in this week's episode. "This is a life changing interview."
This Week on The Sporkful, Mike (shown above) and I make a turkey sandwich. No seriously, we pull out all the stops to make the best damn sandwich ever begotten in a spartan office kitchenette!
I peer over Mike's shoulder, critiquing his painstaking work and teaching him the lost art of sandwich optimization.
Will he master the lost arts of toaster oven setting and tomato slicing? Listen in for the gripping conclusion of Mike's sandwich saga.
Plus, Mike and I discuss why a messy office fridge can be a good thing and ponder the advantages of opaque containers. And Mike shares his fool-proof strategy for preventing office fridge food theft:
"Anything put in a plastic bag never gets pilfered," he says. "If it's in a bag, they don't even know it's there. People know not to look in a bag that's not theirs." As I point out, Google has done research to back up Mike's strategy.
This week's episode is the fourth and final installment in our special investigation of office eating, make sure you check out Parts 1-3 at the links below:
True Crime: Investigating An Office Fridge Food Theft
Office Fridges: What Would the Founding Fathers Do?
Even Spies Hate Stale Bread: Secrets Of The CIA Cafeteria
Later in the show, we dip into the trusty Sporkful mailbox to read a few more of your emails in response to our series on office eating and fridge theft. Many of you asked for my take on smelly foods in the workplace -- so I share the strict code of conduct that governs my own office meals.
And Jenna, who works at a university in New York, writes in to tell us about a famous psychology experiment (shown above) that she and her colleagues recreated in their office kitchen.
"We created a sign with this sentence: 'Please place any dirty dishes in the dishwasher; do not leave dishes in the sink.' Directly underneath the sentence, was a pair of eyes," she writes. "It worked instantly! People began loading the dishwasher with their dishes instead of stacking them in the sink."
You heard it here first, eaters. Big Brother eyes are the secret to office kitchen harmony.
This week's episode of The Sporkful podcast is up! Listen through the player and subscribe in iTunes.
Interstitial music in this episode by BWN Music:
- "Dusty Roads" by Cullen Fitzpatrick
- "Third Party Shuffle" by Kenneth J. Brahmstedt
Photos by Flickr CC/Steve Snodgrass; Andrea Silzenzi; Flickr CC/Alexander Sollie; and New Scientist
