Stuff I Find to Eat...

So here's a new fold in my blog, I have decided to start writing about food I find and eat at my work. I am something of a symbiotic entity at my work, I provide day to day protection and security and the detritus ejected by the office provides me the energy to engage in this service. In essence to guard the site I need scraps to be left in common areas so that I don't pass out or worse yet, die from malnutrition. Now you would think it would be relatively easy to find food in an large office complex, but you would be extremely mistaken. Being that I am a external entity to the company (Security) I have to select my targets carefully.

Examples are as follows...
Birthday Cakes: Can't eat them, unless there is less than a tiny sliver left, or better yet it has been thrown in a trash can. Otherwise I am taking what amounts to a gift from someone I do not know.
Fridge Food: An assured no, I, unlike other office workers would never dream of taking food from the many fridges on site and eating that which does not belong to me. Also most of the fridges contain terrible odors, certain;y caused by their contents.
Food left in empty cubicles: these are items left in clearly unoccupied cubicles, no one works in that spot and thus the food is kind of a mystery. Usually foods left in these spots are cupcakes, bagels, cakes, and donuts. These under no circumstances should be taken, as their presence suggests that one or more of the employees in the immediate vicinity purchased them earlier in the day for everyone there, and thus they are private property.

What food can I openly consume then in my searches? Well after a certain number of cubicles there is a guaranteed "Break Area", where there is usually a coffee pot and odd food stuffs, this is a communal offering, thus any items left out in these areas are open for the taking, however in moderation. Exceptions to this rule are boxes of donuts on Friday night, or rather most food on Friday night. If the food is left uneaten after that point it will simply go stale and be thrown away, meaning I have an obligation to consume that which I find.

If such items are found at any other time during the week discretion is to be made in choosing what to eat. There are six donuts left, three are chocolate, one has some form of creme in it, and another has a piece missing and knife next to it, sometimes the piece that was cut out is also there, suggesting a bad donut. The rule of thumb is to take one from the plentiful group, and if particularly hungry take the least popular donut available. Thus in the morning if anyone still wants them they'll find the more popular donuts still available, and the shitty one no one like is now gone. Also this opens up another chance, if you come back the next day and the donuts are either in the trash, or still there it is open season as they will not be edible by day three.

A rare occurrence is leftovers from a pot luck, or pizzas left on these stations. One of the worst sights to behold in such an environment is the days when a pot luck occurs, or a number of employees purchase a dozen pizzas then walk out with everything, leaving not a crumb. Sometimes if luck is in the air then an employee or two will offer a single piece, at which point it is important to decline, but if persistent it can be acceptable to take the offering. Food from Human Resources is to always be accepted as well as terrible vegetarian sandwich party samplers brought into executive meetings. The bread may be soggy and they may taste like feet but they provide important calories needed to live!

Another common fear people must overcome is the notion that the handful of trash receptacles around the "Commons" areas are "HANDS OFF", in most offices the cans are cleaned every day and lined with plastic, meaning there is little in way of filth and moreover food is often thrown away en masse. There have been quite a few occasions in which pizza boxes and cinnamon roll containers are stuffed into a tiny can, uneaten and still fresh. these must be consumed before discovered by the janitorial staff, who will certainly throw them out as the original owners intended.

Unfortunately however food is scarce most days, and with economic conditions going haywire, many of the previous occurrences or largess by employees is disappearing. It is standard to find food in the building twice to three times a week, thus it will prove necessary to have enough food at home to survive for the days where nothing is available at work. One also must never break the rules about what you can eat on site when starving or desperate for nourishment, to break those rules is to invite unwanted dangers to ones job! Most of those situations that are regarded as no fly zones require that you potentially steal someone else's food, and that's not how etiquette works. So despite what delicious treasures you see in a fridge or empty cubicle, if it is not at a "Commons" area it should not be eaten!

This brings me to today's installment, now that all the description of life here is past. today I was offered, or rather left some form of energy bar made by noted "Crappy Organic" juice company Odwalla. The "Odwalla" bar as it was called, was of the "Choco-walla" persuasion. I am always suspicious of these types of bars, they are usually a puree of disparate items that are then covered in a thin powder of minerals and baked. They are abhorrent to the palate in most cases, and have consistencies akin to chalk mixed with old brownie. The choc-walla however was superior to the companies disgusting juice line, but just barely. It is "chocolaty", in a very conservative way, and has many bizarre after tastes. Reading the label I discover that it is 29% organic, which to me means precisely dick. To me a measurement of "organic" should be either zero or 100%, and I'm sure the people who care about "organic" products predominately feel the same way. To these people seeing that 29% tells them that the remaining 71% is unfit for human consumption, and was probably manufactured on a conveyor belt that it has to share with sides of shit covered beef. This is generally why I dislike people from the "organic" set, they go from zero to crazy in about three seconds when it comes to food manufacturers. So putting the percentage of hand grown wheat germ and stuff aside lets look at the ingredients...
Brown Rice Syrup (i have this to thank for the consistency), this is the largest ingredient in it, there is more syrup in it than oats.
Chocolate chips (made from evaporated this and congealed cane cut that)
Variations on the themes above. Oh yeah, and of course, pureed Dates, Plums and Raisins. those are my least favorite...whatever the fuck they are, berries? Yeah, you could kind of taste the plum behind everything, nasty.

Thankfully it was 240 calories, which should provide me just enough energy to make it home where food is waiting.

I will also point out that Odwalla Inc. is located in Half Moon Bay, California. I was unaware that Half Moon Bay produced the Odwalla line and am saddened by this, it's a really nice part of the state. Also if you happen to be in Half Moon Bay I recommend giving Odwalla a miss and going instead to this breakfast place on the side of the road. Its name escapes me, but it was quite large and the food was better than anything I've pulled out of a trash can here. Then again that makes the food sound sub-par, which is unintentional, the food at this particular restaurant was fabulous!

So in the end, the choco-walla is edible, but so are lots of other things.