If you’ve ever lived in a dorm room or had roommates, then you’ve probably dealt with the occasional (or frequent!) food thief. Whether your roomie snagged your pre-made lunch or swiped the ingredients you bought to make yourself dinner, stealing food is a definite violation of trust. (Not to be dramatic, but it is.)
When I was in my freshman year of undergrad, for example, I lived in a dorm room with one other girl. I went to school during the day, did homework during the afternoons, and waited tables at night. (She spent her freshman year watching anime on Netflix.) One night, I worked an extremely long shift. I was tired and ready to go home and eat the only thing that was keeping me hopeful that night—leftover Chinese food.
When I finally got home, however, my Chinese food was nowhere to be found (we had a small, dorm fridge). I was furious, to say the least. We didn’t have any other food in our dorm room, so I ventured out to get bread, peanut butter, and jelly. Unfortunately, I was so out-of-it that I forgot the bread on the baggage carousel. To make a long story short—I had a very rough night that night thanks to a food-robbing roommate.
So, after reading this woman’s story about her food-thieving co-worker, I have to say, I’m on her side 100 percent.
Apparently, there’s a subreddit dedicated to finding out whether you’re a jerk or not.
After throwing out her co-workers’ food, she felt compelled to ask the public what they thought about her lunchtime escapade.
In an AITA subreddit, Reddit user u/accountthrowmeawaybe asked fellow Redditors if they thought she was a jerk for throwing out her co-workers’ food. Your immediate answer to that question may be “Yes,” but you need to hear the entire story first. Not everything is so black-and-white, you know?
Let’s start with the facts.
She just returned to work from maternity leave.
The food-stealing began shortly after she returned back from maternity leave. (So this person is stealing from a brand-new mother!)
“I’ve just returned to work since having my Bub,” she writes. “I’m a coeliac and obviously can only eat gluten-free. I make a special lunch every day for work.”
This poor woman has celiac disease–which means she cannot eat gluten.
What is celiac disease?
Celiac disease (also known in the UK as coeliac disease) is a serious condition in which the body’s immune system attacks itself whenever gluten is ingested. This can cause damage to the lining of the gut–which means the body’s chances of properly absorbing nutrients is unlikely during a flare-up.
The only treatment option for celiac disease is a gluten-free diet.
Which this woman is clearly going out of her way to follow.
In hopes of preventing a flare-up, she packs special, gluten-free lunches each day. (All of which are clearly labeled with her name.) For four consecutive days, her food was magically disappearing from the communal fridge. By the second week, she sent a kind email to the staff to alert them of the issue.
Sadly, her kind email didn’t work.
So, she went to her boss.
The next day (post-email), she found that her food was missing from the fridge yet again. So she did the only thing there was left to do—she went to the boss. But he didn’t take any drastic measures to solve the problem—he just sent out yet another email reminding the staff to only eat what’s theirs. (You shouldn’t have to tell a group of adults to “only eat their food.” This isn’t preschool.)
Guess what?
His email didn’t work, either.
The next day, it happened again. (This thief is honestly ridiculous.)
“I asked my boss if we could put cameras in the lunchroom, he said ‘No,'” she writes. “I asked if he would comp my lunch expenses as I had to buy from the local cafe and [it’s] expensive yo! He again said ‘No.’ I sent out another email and spoke to as many people as I could (about 15 out of the 20 in my office).”
Even after both failed attempts, she went to work the next day feeling positive.
How she hasn’t raged through the entire office at this point is beyond me.
Instead of busting into work, which is exactly what I would have done, she left another note on her lunch noting that it was hers and that she would appreciate it if no one touched it. By lunchtime, her food was gone. So she did exactly what I would have done…
She threw out everyone’s food.
Finally, she gets revenge.
Want to know the best part? No one even knew it was her!
“The boss sent out another email threatening written notice for anyone who touches anyone else’s food,” she writes. “My lunch hasn’t been touched since.” Sweet victory.
Even though I’m all for her final actions, there are quite a few people who disagree.
Her husband was the first to tell her it was a pretty jerk thing to do.
“My Husband told me I was an a-hole because everyone in my office didn’t deserve to have their lunch ruined because of one person stealing mine,” she writes. “I think I’m justified because no one took the blame for what they did, and my boss wouldn’t do anything about it. I’m sure once everyone had their lunch ruined they understood how much it would have sucked for me.”
Reddit users were also quick to judge her actions.
I guess ruining everyone’s lunch wasn’t the best thing to do in this situation.
Several users commented that her act of revenge was selfish and that no one, including her, has the right to touch someone else’s food. But, in the same breath, this judgemental Reddit user suggested spiking her lunches to catch the culprit.
Now, who’s the jerk?
I mean, come on this isn’t a prank war.
Instead of simply throwing out her co-worker’s lunches, Reddit user FatManJay told her she should have spiked her lunch with ghost peppers. “Won’t be long until you know who’s taking it,” he writes.
This is terrible advice.
That could get you sucked into a lawsuit.
Tampering (even with your own lunch) in an attempt to harm someone else is against the law. Why? Because you could actually poison them. There’s an entire Reddit thread discussing this very issue. It was a classic case of someone stole my brownie, so I laced them with laxatives.
Laxatives, however, can be fatal.
In 2014, 12 adults and one child died of an accidental overdose.
Rule of thumb: Read the label. According to the Food and Drug Administration, some over-the-counter laxatives are potentially dangerous if the dosing instructions are ignored.
“The bottom line is that these products are safe for otherwise healthy adults and older children for whom dosing instructions are provided on the Drug Facts label as long as they follow these dosing instructions and don’t take the product more often, or in greater amounts, than the label instructs,” FDA medical officer, Dr. Mona Khurana said in a statement.
The Cut’s writer Katie Heaney experienced a similar situation when she encountered a phantom lunch thief.
Heaney says, anyone “who’s ever worked in an office with more than, say, 30 employees,” has or seen their co-workers take preventive action against lunch snatchers.
You’ll know if someone has been burned by an all-caps Post-It note was posted, instructing the thief: “PLEASE DO NOT TAKE FOOD THAT DOESN’T BELONG TO YOU.”
After about two months of having her food stolen, she began to investigate what kind of person steals their co-workers’ lunch.
While her own lunch thief did not take the bait, she took to Twitter, but still couldn’t find someone willing to speak up.
Ultimately, she turned to Reddit.
As expected, Reddit had a few lunch theft discussion threads, so she messaged about 20 users who had stolen lunches.
While this led to a few dead ends, a man wrote her back.
She arranged a phone call with him, and learned his name is Rob and he’s a programmer.
Since his name is fairly common, he had no issue waiving confidentiality.
Rob admitted he hasn’t stolen a lunch in two years, but his crime spree ended when he started working from home.
Between shared refrigerators and no consequences, the temptation of some sugar or caffeine pulled him to the petty theft.
“When I first started working I would work late a lot, and I would forget to bring extra food and drinks, so I would just take a soda here and there,” he tells me.
His moral compass, however, soon devolved.
“I’d usually replace it, at first. Then you get kinda lazy, and you stop replacing it, and pretty soon you move on to packaged things, like cupcakes,” he added.
Eventually he owns up to taking things with absolutely no intention of replacing hem.
Rob wanted to make it clear, while he did taken sweets and the occasional frozen TV dinner, he never stole someone’s sandwich.
Despite his obvious crimes, Rob credits people’s fear of confrontation of not getting caught.
“Even if you were the only one there last night, and they had the food before they left, and they came in the next morning and it was gone … even if they know if you’re the last one there, a lot of times people won’t confront you about it,” he said.
Heaney wanted to ask him some hard questions, like if he ever felt bad for him victims.
Rob’s answer is insanely relatable: it “kinda depends on the co-worker.”
Heaney, then asks him to consider his co-workers “gazing sadly into the refrigerator” and it really affected him.
Rob says, “Knowing you have that soda there in the fridge at 3 or 4 in the afternoon when you really need it … that’s gotta suck for someone else.”
After some thought, Rob said, “I’m not a horrible person, but clearly I have ethical issues.”
Still looking for a more psychological answer, Heaney interviewed Art Markman, a professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas at Austin.
“Everybody’s got something they do that they can justify and feel is okay,” Markman told The Cut. “It might not be lunch stealing. But there’s always some rule that you personally feel you can violate.”
So, lying to get out of plans or calling in sick to work, when you’re fine, makes you as bad as Rob.
Heaney observed some of her own bad behavior, like taking a “fist full of office tampons” instead of buying her own.
“Most people want to generally go around seeing themselves as being honest, good folks,” Markman explains. “But if you give people a chance to do something that violates the rules, and there’s probably not a big chance they’re going to get caught, you’ll find a fair number of people who would be willing to do stuff that they would say to your face they’d never do.”
Unfortunately for Heaney, Markman can’t offer her the answer she’s looking for. While she wanted to believe someone like Rob is a psychopath, Markman theorizes lunch thieves are jut hungry…and co-workers’ lunches are convenient.
Markman did explain why lunch theft feels so wrong.
“Anytime somebody steals something from you, it feels like a personal violation,” Markman pointed out. “And what makes matters worse with lunch in the workplace is that these people are your colleagues.”
And on a happier note, Rob appears to be living proof someone can be “semi-reformed.”
“The last time he was in an office, he regularly bought gallons of milk for office use, as a sort of karmic payback for prior sins,” Heaney revealed.
Rob, however, probably won’t be doing that again.
“I was like, you know what, I’m just going to buy a gallon of milk every week and put it in the fridge and write ‘Free to Anybody’ on it,” Rob told Heaney. “And then of course, some jerk takes the whole thing home.”
So what do you do if you catch your co-worker in the act?
According to a 2017 American Express OPEN survey, about 18 percent of Americans admit that they’ve stolen a coworker’s lunch.
URBO, which describes the crime as one of the worst office sins imaginable, rounded some of the best ways people responded to catching their co-workers stealing.
“There used to be a guy who would steal my energy drinks from the walk-in cooler,” says Quora user Rik Osborne. “When called on it, he would insist he was drinking his own, and unfortunately, there was no way to prove [the theft], because he did indeed frequently bring energy drinks to work.”
Since energy drinks are expensive, he came up with the best solution.
“I started taking a Sharpie and writing the words ‘STOLEN FROM RIK’ on the bottoms of my cans. So now, if he was drinking one of mine, everybody could see it—every time he lifted the can to his lips.”
One Reddit user, who likes to cook his wife a “delicious lunch each day” got tired of hearing “that someone was stealing her lunch every couple of days out of the fridge at work.”
The solution?
“I made her some buffalo wings for lunch to put in the fridge,” the author, before revealing he’d used some incredibly spice sauce. Instead of following the manufacturer’s recommendation, this Reddit user added several drops per wing AND a “nice dusting of ghost chili powder for good measure.”
“I did eat a couple to make sure it wouldn’t kill anybody,” he warned. “They were real hot. Even cream doesn’t cut the heat, and ghost chilies keep getting hotter for about five minutes after you consume them. Needless to say, just before lunch, there was a shrill scream from the kitchen.”
It turns out her male co-worker had helped himself to this woman’s lunch and ended up vomiting all over the toilet.
He says his wife recalled his moans sounding like he was dying, meanwhile his wife “just sat there innocently pretending like nothing was wrong.”
Nothing, however, beats this next story. And, honestly, you’re never going to want to steal someone’s lunch…especially not at a law firm.
Quora user Kevin Mark Wray worked as a paralegal at a law firm, who took stealing very seriously.
He said. “Everyone suspected various attorneys, since we had such a busy floor—we were in the litigation department—it was difficult to [determine] who it might be.”
They set up a webcam in the break-room, which Kevin explains was really just a fridge, coffee station, and a copier, and waited.
Two days later, they had the thief on camera and sent the thief a note containing every victim’s request for a catered lunch.
“The note with the photos said: ‘Pay up, or we send the entire footage of the 45-second theft to the management committee.’ He ordered the lunches and the thefts ended right then and there,” Kevin revealed.
He also offered a pretty solid piece of advice, advising people to also use a webcam, since it’s never okay to poison someone.
So, if you’re not willing to eat a lunch you’ve bobby trapped, don’t make it available.
Maybe acts of retaliation are just as bad as the stealing?
The thing is, lunch thieves always get caught. Whether they become infamous in the office, or not, they’ll never be viewed the same way.
Because you can never quite trust the man or woman who stole your fried rice leftovers you’d thought about all day, ever again.
What’s the moral of this story?
Don’t be a jerk–just leave your co-worker’s food alone.
At the end of the day, the Golden Rule is the best way to avoid any issues. Treat others the way you want to be treated, and (hopefully) nothing terrible will happen to you or your sack lunch.
