
What Google's Famous Cafeterias Can Teach Us About Health - sasvari
http://www.theatlantic.com/life/print/2011/07/what-googles-famous-cafeterias-can-teach-us-about-health/241876/
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cletus
One correction and one comment:

The article says cafeterias are available 24/7. That is not technically
correct. The cafeterias are open for various meals on various days (eg one
might do breakfast and lunch 5 days a week, another might do lunch 5 days a
week and dinner 4 days a week).

What are available 24/7 are the micro-kitchens, which have coffee machines,
breakfast cereal, various snacks, sodas, ice tea, etc. It is true that these
do tend to have a healthier focus but it depends on what office you're in.

Also, I don't know what vending machines there are. I haven't seen any but
then again I'm based on New York (although I've spent quite a bit of time in
Mountain View).

So I'm not sure how the article reaches the conclusion it does because, at
least in Mountain View, it's entirely possible to eat nothing but Oreos and
Kit-Kats from the MKs 24/7.

It is true however that those items do tend to be on the lower shelves.

Lastly, this article seems very focused on Mountain View but that's only one
of many offices, although it is by far the largest. In New York for example
there are no bikes but there are scooters (the building we're in is an entire
downtown city block and one of our floors is the entire floor so scooters
actually do come in handy for traversing level 4).

I haven't seen bikes or scooters outside of these two offices however.

~~~
Locke1689
In Chicago,

* There are no scooters or bikes

* The cafeteria is only open for breakfast and lunch

* The microkitchens are slightly smaller but very similar to the ones in MTV. There are a lot of "healthy" options but the choice is less eclectic.

So depending on your office YMMV.

------
scottyallen
The vending machine isn't quite what the article makes it out to be. For
starters, it's one vending machine in all of Google (as far as I know).

It magically appeared one April Fool's day, and has been attributed to some of
the SREs in charge of keeping web search running, but credit has never been
claimed. There was a rather funny "I am spartacus" thread about the vending
machine that appeared on a major email list after one of the facilities or
kitchen management asked who was responsible, ostensibly so they could
congratulate them.

I no longer work at Google (though I used to work downstairs from the vending
machine), so it's awesome to hear it's still up and running and being stocked.
I believe, at least for a while, facilities/cafe staff were officially
condoning it if not restocking it. Definitely one of the more clever pranks I
saw around campus.

~~~
jackowayed
Does Google have a culture of pranks/hacks? It certainly makes sense, but I've
never really heard anything about it

~~~
scottyallen
Yes, some places more than others, though. It's not highly generally highly
publicized.

That is, other than the "offical" April Fool's jokes. Googlers LOVE April
Fool's day, and there's generally a solid handful of nonpublic April Fool's
day jokes on campus.

But there's also just random pranks. Some I'm aware of:

\- Everyone's photos on the internal people database (available on an internal
website) showed up with either crazy sunglasses or mustaches. Someone,
probably a vision researcher, used facial recognition to do in bulk.

\- Eric's picture had a photo on the wall behind him, and the photo was very
subtly swapped with a picture of Bill Gates.

\- There was a long series of pranks having to do with pink plastic flamingos
and the T-Rex skeleton in Mountain View that were quite funny, though I forgot
the full sequence. It had to do with T-Rex being surrounded by pink flamingos,
then someone changed it to flamingos attacking T-Rex, then someone else
brought a giant can of "flamingo bait", and all the flamingos were lying dead
around T-Rex. It unfolded over a week or two, with it changing every few days.

\- I was on a team that pranked each other whenever someone went on vacation.
The most memorable of which involved filling a 12'x12'x8' glass walled office
from floor to ceiling with pink balloons:
[http://www.menalto.com/photos/miscellaneous/google/Pranks/20...](http://www.menalto.com/photos/miscellaneous/google/Pranks/2000PinkBalloons)

~~~
nostrademons
Couple other recent ones:

\- For April Fools day this year, the internal corp login page rick-rolled
everyone.

\- Larry Page has this crusade to make meetings more efficient, so all around
campus are these posters that say things like "All meetings should have a
single decider" or "Meetings should not have more than 10 people". Well, soon
after, a bunch of posters appeared saying motivational things like "You're
building the future. Make it awesome." I couldn't tell if this was a very
subtle troll or a well-intentioned but ultimately condescending attempt at
motivating people, but in either case, the response is the same: troll harder.
So with a couple friends, we put up posters that said things like "Read
slogans", "You will do whatever this poster says", or "All meetings require a
unicorn and a pony." Well, sure enough, after a couple days another round of
posters went up that said things like "Red" (on a yellow poster) or similar
absurdities. Then a day or so after that, another round of posters went up
with "The posters will continue until morale improves."

\- (I was on the same team as Scotty, but a couple years later, so we didn't
overlap except socially.) When we got back from a team retreat in Pittsburgh,
our work area was all cordoned off with police tape, with all the furniture
turned upside down, courtesy of the people who hadn't gone.

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michael_dorfman
_The only place on the campus where employees pay for food is from a vending
machine. The pricing strategy is based on nutrient content, again according to
the Harvard pyramid plan. For the vended products, you pay:_

    
    
      one cent per gram of sugar
      two cents per gram of fat
      four cents per gram of saturated fat
      one *dollar* per gram of trans fat
    
    

That's very cool. I'd love to see this concept get wider usage.

~~~
dekayed
Unfortunately it seems to penalize people who choose to eat more fat vs.
carbs.

~~~
FaceKicker
That's a problem with the entire green/yellow/red color-coding system at
Google as well - the labels seem to be in line with the common belief that
whole grains = always good and dietary fat = always bad.

Then again, it's not really difficult to figure out from the list of
ingredients whether food is in line with your personal dietary belief system,
so the color-coding system isn't really all that valuable to begin with.

~~~
Hisoka
That problem stems from the source that Google chose to base their system off
- the Harvard Pyramid. They wanted to be as least controversial as possible
(aka popular conventions) so whole grains are viewed as healthy, and fatty
foods aren't. That's the principle we've been hammered from the government and
food associations since forever. Unfortunately, it's wrong, and just a little
research reveals it. But people will always want to refute you... because
they've been so used to it, and they don't want to give it up.

Unfortunately, not being controversial is also the same as being wrong in this
case

~~~
Afton
I'm very very sympathetic to this view. I eat a high-fat diet, and have for
over a year. But Google is probably right to act conservatively here. Don't
blame Google for following the Harvard Pyramid, blame the Harvard Pyramid.
They're the ones with the responsibility to update the status quo.

~~~
rkowalick
You should probably look at the Harvard Pyramid before making judgments based
on Google's interpretation:

[http://www.personal.kent.edu/~cearley/ChemWrld/foodpyramid/H...](http://www.personal.kent.edu/~cearley/ChemWrld/foodpyramid/HarvardPyramid.gif)

They recommend eating lots of healthy fats such as olive, canola, and peanut
oil. They also have refined carbohydrates in the "use sparingly" category.

~~~
Afton
Thanks, but I did. And I'm _still_ not criticizing their interpretation (which
seems like a good faith read of the pyramid). I just disagree that the HP is
the only way to eat healthily, and I'm mixed on whether the HP is a generally
healthy way to eat.

Also, you may wish to dismiss me as crazy. I eat almost exclusively from the
top left triangle. :)

------
edw519
_The pricing strategy is based on nutrient content, again according to the
Harvard pyramid plan. For the vended products, you pay: one cent per gram of
sugar, two cents per gram of fat, four cents per gram of saturated fat, one
dollar per gram of trans fat..._

Reminds me of the time I encountered a world renowned nutritional expert...

edw519: "I'm having trouble understanding these food labels."

expert: "Don't eat anything with a label."

~~~
zck
Jack LaLanne made two relevant comments (<http://www.jacklalanne.com/jacks-
adventures/lalanneisms.php>):

>If man makes it, don’t eat it.

>If it tastes good, spit it out.

------
acconrad
Trying to include vegetables in everything? Smart. But in no way are SunChips
"eat anytime" food...certainly not healthier than walnuts. You don't see a
page like this
([http://whfoods.org/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=99](http://whfoods.org/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=99))
about SunChips.

If you want sound nutritional advice, I would tweak the Harvard pyramid in two
ways: there's nothing you can gain from whole grains that you can't gain from
fruits and vegetables. They should generally be regarded as yellow. The other
thing is that they feature some really unhealthy fats that they consider to be
healthy: soy, canola, sunflower, peanut, and other vegetable oils. Truly
healthy fats would be red palm, coconut, olive and macadamia.

And while I applaud the idea of making junk food more expensive, their
implementation based on macronutrients is horribly flawed. Sugar (which could
include high-fructose corn syrup) is cheaper and offers virtually no benefit
unless you are priming for a workout and require the energy and insulin spike.
Fat provides satiety and promotes hormonal balance, particularly if the omegas
(3,6,9) are balanced. They're off to a good start, but the article did a
horrible job of illustrating how healthy they are.

~~~
die_sekte
Canola oil is basically the only mainstream cooking oil with a somewhat
healthy omega-3/6 ratio. Why do you think it's unhealthy?

~~~
Shorel
It stops being healthy if you heat it enough. Like frying stuff with it.

------
vvpan
I really dislike these "what X can teach us about Y" titles, especially when
they are misused. Like in this case, where "Google's Famous Cafeteria" has
nothing to teach us about health which we did not know. It can make us
jealous, though.

------
grannyg00se
Sun Chips get a GREEN while 0.8 ounces of walnuts get a YELLOW label. What the
hell?!

------
warmfuzzykitten
It's crazy to charge twice as much for fat as for sugar. Sure, fat has a
little over twice as many calories as sugar, but fat won't give you diabetes
and kill you. Sugar is actively dangerous. The country is still in the grip of
the low-fat diet fad which has had the result of...wait for it...making us all
fatter. And sicker.

------
zentechen
My fav:

Smaller plate -> smaller portion.

That should be something easy to get started for any company.

~~~
simonsarris
The food network did a big segment a while back on obesity and concluded that
the simplest and most effective lifestyle choice you can make is using smaller
plates.

------
Tharkun
I do wish more companies would take lessons from this. Sadly it seems like
this will only ever work for relatively big companies. Having to hire someone
to cook for a team of 10 doesn't really seem worth it. And feeding a team of
10 anything other than sandwiches seems impractical.

There are many catering services out there that (pardon the pun) cater to
smaller crowds, but in my experience their food is invariably crap. Think
hospital chow. I'd like to see this void filled. Surely there's room for a
"health lunches delivered on your doorstep"-startup? Because face it, we
programmers need to be fed healthy food, because our natural instincts seem to
direct us to the nearest pizza place.

~~~
ciupicri
Why not bring your own food? Some sandwiches for example. Nuts and seeds
(flax, hemp) or (canned) fish (salmon, sardines, mackerel, tuna) are also a
good option.

~~~
lutorm
Yeah, I almost always bring leftovers from our dinners as lunch. I only buy
lunch when we for whatever reason don't have any leftovers.

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hzay
1\. The food is not available 24/7. There are snacks 24/7 but not the "famous
food program".

2\. Not all of it is totally free. There are paid breakfast services in some
offices.

------
quadrant6
In our office, the cupboards are stocked with Coke, V, Potato Chips and snack
bars.

------
fedd
i think i would be hungry all the time at google

