Susan Jebb ‘vilifies’ office cake, likens it to passive smoking

The ritual of sharing the humble bake has been compared to passive smoking. Photo / Getty Images

In a divided and increasingly secular world, office cake is one of the few rituals that still binds us. The cause might be a birthday, or a Friday, or a leaving do, or simple enthusiasm for baking, but the rule holds: when you work in an office, sometimes someone will turn up with a cake.

If the cake is homemade, everyone will gather to congratulate their colleague on their ingenuity. If it is shop-bought, everyone will gather round to pay respects to Colin, Cuthbert, Curly, Cecil, Clyde, Morris or even another variety that isn’t an anthropomorphic caterpillar named after a doomed Tommy. The logic of the office cake is simple. The cake-givers get the satisfaction of providing. The cake-eaters get a sugar hit to help them stave off the existential abyss of office life for a few minutes. The cake-refusers get to feel what cake-refusers always want to feel, which is smug. A pleasant and harmless tradition, however you slice it.

Or so you might have thought. Now, office cake has become the latest bastion of civilisation to fall to the fun police as they continue their implacable stomp through society. In an interview with the Times, Professor Susan Jebb, an Oxford academic and the chairwoman of the Food Standards Agency, compared office cake to passive smoking.

“If nobody brought cakes into the office, I would not eat cakes in the day, but because people do bring cakes in, I eat them,” she said, in a report that stressed that she was speaking in a personal capacity. “Now, okay, I have made a choice, but people were making a choice to go into a smoky pub.”

She suggested that colleagues could help provide a “supportive environment” for avoiding eating cake by not bringing them in. Leaving aside the fact that even the heaviest breathers struggle to inhale secondhand cake off a neighbour’s desk, the policy seems mean-spirited and raises the possibility that the Food Standards Agency is not a haven of jollity. You suspect Jebb’s colleagues will provide a very supportive environment for not eating cake from now on.

“It’s a slightly ridiculous statement,” says Annabel Lui who, with her sister Emily, is the co-founder of Cutter & Squidge, a London-based bakery delivering cakes, brownies and other treats around the UK. “You can’t control what somebody else is smoking but you can control what you put in your own mouth. We should be teaching our children that everything in moderation is fine. Our clients don’t want to send vegetables.” The sisters say they are still seeing increased sales to offices, as well as companies sending treats to people working at home.

“You can’t control what somebody else is smoking but you can control what you put in your own mouth. We should be teaching our children that everything in moderation is fine." Photo / 123rf

“Every culture has a celebratory cake,” adds Emily. “To vilify an honest gift that someone brings to the office to share a good moment with their team is a bit of a Debbie Downer, isn’t it?”

The history on this subject is not rich, but the office cake tradition can trace its origins in part to the tea trolley, a once-common sight in British workplaces that has vanished in recent decades and been replaced by canteens or the dreaded “tea station”, a kind of amphitheatre for awkward small talk. Today, UK professionals are expected to make their own hot drinks or, even worse, buy them from “outside”, from which they are also expected to hunter-gather their own lunches. Supermarkets, ever-cunning, realise that employees on a sandwich run may think of getting something for their colleagues and so arrange cakes and cake-like items conveniently near the tills.

According to Public Health England, 63 per cent of adults in England are overweight, including 25 per cent who are obese.

While cake sales have remained steady in the UK, the authorities are creating an increasingly hostile environment for small treats. According to Public Health England, 63 per cent of adults in England are overweight, including 25 per cent who are obese. The number is rising year on year. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence has put part of the blame for this on “obesogenic environments”, which encourage people to eat junk food and not exercise enough. Think of high streets populated with burger shops or stores full of sweets. It’s one of the reasons Birmingham City Council has limited the number of takeaways to 10 per cent of units. The communal office cake is an indoor version of this, like a row of tiny sweet shops along a bank of desks – there are 230 calories in a slice of lemon drizzle.

Not everyone agrees that cake in the office is a harmless injection of joy in an otherwise depressing day. “I sympathise with Susan Jebb and I say that as someone who used to relentlessly smoke next to non-smoking colleagues,” says Paul Nuki, the Telegraph’s global health editor. “I wouldn’t ban office snacks but you ignore the office feeder at your peril; deliberately or not, they make sticking to a healthy diet much more difficult. Ironically, the very worst place I worked for this was at the Department of Health. The place was full of feeders. You couldn’t move for Colin the Caterpillars and those tubs of Marks and Spencer mini bites.”

Ironically, the very worst place I worked for this was at the Department of Health. The place was full of feeders. You couldn’t move for Colin the Caterpillars and those tubs of Marks and Spencer mini bites.” Photo / Getty Images

The anti-cake brigade sometimes claim that their objections are about more than sugar avoidance and willpower. Cake in the office, like babies in the office, might seem cute to the bringer but can be irritating to others. Otherwise tidy adults are apt to forget their table manners when they are eating lemon drizzle off a filing cabinet. In this regard, slightly too large personal portions, like a cupcake or a cookie, are worse than a large cake, which can be sliced thinly. Twelve cupcakes at 3pm means 12 mangled cupcake carcasses by 5.30pm, as a succession of colleagues, fooling no one but themselves, attempt to slice them into ever more improbable chunks. Loo roll is not the same as a plate. Knives, especially plastic ones, lead to crumbs. A knife is not always available, in which case the cake will be mangled by a fork, a spoon, a ruler or whatever else with an edge is to hand. Crumbs lead to mice.

These moments can be socially awkward, too. For research purposes, I bought a Colin the Caterpillar cake from M&S (£8.75, ($16.79) more than a pound per segment) to see what responses it provoked in my colleagues. His boxed presence was enough to make one woman recoil in horror. She spoke movingly of accepting cake from former colleagues, so as not to feel like a pariah, only to then feel depressed later when she found she wasn’t hungry when she was having dinner with her “real friends”. Another eagerly accepted Colin’s bum, but said she wouldn’t eat his face. Colin’s bum is popular, I gather, for its unmatched chocolate-bum ratio.

One could argue that the office cake-feeders start bringing in baked goods in accordance with The Great British Bake Off hitting screens.

Above all, office cake culture is a feeder’s charter. Just as some people like to host, certain individuals get disproportionate pleasure from bringing food to their co-workers. These are the office feeders. They have a knife in their drawer, their Tupperware is abundant and their currency is human weakness. “I made brownies,” they will say, proffering a tin full of chocolate ooze on a Monday morning. The next day there will be muffins, or cupcakes, or a huge lemon drizzle they didn’t “quite” finish. The effect is notably pronounced around The Great British Bake Off, just as the public tennis courts fill up during Wimbledon. To generalise, in my experience the office feeders are more likely to be women than men. There is something maternal about providing a cake, just as eating one can’t help but cast you back to the birthdays of your childhood. Some have suggested replacing cake with healthy snacks, but there is nothing homely or reassuring about an edamame bean.

The specific politics of office cake are convoluted, but the overall anti-cake trend is clear. Many nurseries and schools already ban children from bringing in cakes, ostensibly on allergen grounds but also, one suspects, because the staff would prefer their charges not to be hopped up on sugar. Nurseries are nothing if not the offices of the future. Whatever pleas one might make for moderation or free will, this is the Susan Jebb era, where the Government will do whatever it can to treat adults like toddlers. Let them eat cake, but only if they ask very nicely, do it in the privacy of their own home and promise not to get fat.