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. ...