my lying coworker claimed someone said I couldn’t eat at my desk

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager .
A reader writes:
I have a very low-stakes question that I’ve been wondering about since I left my last job a few years ago.
In my previous role, I shared a four-person office with two junior employees and one other senior employee. The other senior employee, Sam, had 20 years more experience than I did, but we had the same job title and were equals hierarchically. He often tried to act like he was my superior, but I mainly ignored his provocations and just took care of my tasks while minimizing interactions with him. We did not have client-facing roles and our office didn’t have a lot of foot traffic or visitors, but we were near the main entrance, so very occasionally a visitor who got lost would come by our office and ask for directions.
At some point I got on a bit of a health kick and started making myself healthy breakfasts — things like acai bowls or overnight oats in a mason jar — and bringing them to the office to eat first thing in the morning. I would occasionally add spinach or spirulina, so sometimes these breakfasts were green-colored. I tried to be conscientious about noise and never made anything crunchy that my office mates would have to listen to me chewing. Other than the noise, I didn’t worry much about it because we often had food or snacks in the office: someone would bring cookies back after lunch, or pastries in the morning, or candy around Easter, etc., so I thought it wasn’t a problem to eat in the office.
One morning I was called out of our office for a meeting and I left my green overnight oats on my desk. When I came back, Sam said to me, “Hey, someone came by and said that you need to stop eating at your desk because it’s not professional.” I knew everyone in our 60-person company, so I asked him who had said it. He was evasive — “Oh, it’s not important who said it”; “The person said not to tell you who they were”; “A few people have commented on it now” — but I kept pressing, and finally he said, “It was someone in HR.” Our HR department at the time was only one person, and I happened to know that she was out that day.
So I knew Sam was lying to me, but I thought that maybe my eating was bothering him and he just didn’t want to tell me. I decided to stop bringing in my healthy breakfasts, even though they brought me joy in a fairly joyless job, in order to keep the peace in our shared office. The VERY NEXT DAY, though, Sam brought in a tray of croissants, one of which he was eating while leaning over my desk and leaving croissant flakes all over my work surface. I (rather snarkily) said to him, “Oh, I thought eating in the office was unprofessional?” and he innocently replied, “I never said that, it was HR!”
I never brought it up again — and also never brought breakfast in again — and thankfully left that job for a much better opportunity just a few months later. But in that context, what is etiquette for eating at your desk? And is there an actual difference between eating something like overnight oats, or pastries that everyone can share?
Sam was just a liar, and a particularly bad liar too. He thought he could tell you that some anonymous person ordered you to stop eating at your desk and you would just comply without asking any questions? Or that you would accept “it’s not important who said it”? (It is!) Or “the person said not to tell you who they were”? (No one with the authority to issue that edict would refuse to let you know it came from them, since that would take away the edict’s power.) And it didn’t occur to him that when he finally blamed HR, you might decide to verify that with them?
Anyway, no, eating in your office is not unprofessional.
There are some offices where it’s not done because of the norms of that particular office — but you already knew that you weren’t in one of them, because people brought in food all the time. Sometimes there are sub-norms in a particular workplace too, like that it’s not done by people without their own offices, or by people whose desks are in areas that visitors see when they walk in. But again, that doesn’t sound like the case for you.
And there isn’t typically a “shared food only” rule; if it’s an office where people eat shared food at their desks, you’re likely to see people bring in their own food too.
My guess is that Sam was grossed out by your green overnight oats (they’re not particularly visually appealing if you’re unfamiliar with them — they do look like green mush , although that’s none of his business) and decided he was entitled to try to get you to stop (he wasn’t).
The etiquette for eating at your desk is simply to be thoughtful about the impact on others — which means things like strong smells or loud noises, not that someone might have to see a jar of green mush.
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