Avoid Lunchroom Food Fights

Editor's note: If you have a pressing business-etiquette question for Miss Conduct, please send her an email.

Between the proliferation of food allergies and the renaissance of organic, vegan, flexitarian, raw and other health-related nutrition regimes (not to even mention weight-reduction schemes), the lunch box has become a window into far more than our colleagues' hunger pangs.

With the various deprivation diets above attempting to balance out the processed-food-only menu for everyone else in America, the office fridge has become the front line in nothing less than a cultural war.

Let's call it the smug vs. the happy. The smug, on the one hand -- some of whom consider themselves tolerant -- will nevertheless insist on educating anyone who will listen about the dangers of factory farming, feedlots and artificial bovine growth hormones, or so Miss Conduct has read, between volumes on food science and food-borne diseases.

The smug find comfort in the fact that they can vote with their pocketbooks, that they can stick it to the Coca-Cola Man by filling a canteen with water and a squeeze of lemon.

They can bring organic fruits and vegetables to snack on while at work, and their virtue saves them restaurant money as well as fat-soluble-contaminant deposits around their internal organs. To them, cramming the office fridge with miso mayo and pomegranate juice is empowering.

On the other hand, the happy just want to eat something tasty and not hear about yet another issue that's amiss in the world. For them, lunch in the office kitchen is refuge, a moment of gratification in an otherwise barren landscape of sacrifice for money, family, corporation and country.

They just want a little pleasure, and whether it's a franchise burger or foie gras, they want to enjoy their slice of salami with red-pepper flakes but without negative associations.