Nothing Brings Out the Worst in Your Co-Workers Like a Well-Intentioned Office Potluck

Work Office Potlucks Bring Out the Weirdest Version of Everyone Why are we fighting over pound cake? Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Field of Poppies Photography/iStock/Getty Images Plus, Ryan McVay/Getty Images Plus, and chekat/Getty Images Plus. Few people are as knee-deep in our work-related anxieties and sticky office politics as Alison Green, who has been fielding workplace questions for a decade now on her website Ask a Manager. In Direct Report, she spotlights themes from her inbox that help explain the modern workplace and how we could be navigating it better. Office potlucks should be among the lowest-stakes events on the work calendar: no deadlines, no presentations, no performance reviews, just a table full of food and a chance to enjoy a meal with co-workers. Yet somehow, asking a group of adults to bring lunch for one another can produce territorial disputes, gastrointestinal distress, and even HR complaints. In part, the source of the weirdness is that, unlike with almost everything else at work, there are very few formal rules when it comes to potlucks. How much effort is enough? Do contributions need to be homemade, or does buying something count? Is it rude to just contribute napkins? There’s no employee handbook for “How much effort should I put into a casserole?” or “Is it acceptable to bring McDonald’s?” So everyone fills in the rules themselves, and sometimes things go sideways. Let’s take the question of effort. Some people approach the assignment with almost touching enthusiasm, spending hours creating a culinary masterpiece. Others display a breathtaking confidence that the minimum viable contribution will suffice, as these accounts illustrate: A co-worker went to the trouble of getting ~40 McDonald’s dollar-menu hamburgers, unwrapping them all, and trying to pass them off as freshly homemade sliders. We usually have a potluck at the end of the year. Some people make a fancy dish, buy a thing of cookies or chips, a veggie tray, etc. My favorite was last year when someone unwrapped a block of cheddar, put it on a plate and stuck a plastic fork in it. Like it was Excalibur. My co-worker used to bring her “famous salsa” to every potluck. It was just three different brands of store-bought salsa mixed together. She even made a (completely serious) production of preparing it in the kitchen, like she was Julia Child. Pro tip: The trick was to “fold” the salsa to get the best flavor. There’s also the question of planning, as this person recounts: I worked for a congregation for a while that refused to plan their potlucks. Everybody just showed up with what they wanted to bring and “it all worked out in the end!” Until the potluck that shall live in infamy, because that was the potluck with, I counted, 14 kinds of potato salad! About three main entrees, and a couple of Jell-O salads for dessert, and other than that it was just all potato salad as far as the eye could see. After that one, they started planning their potlucks and having sign-up sheets for bringing entrees versus side dishes versus dessert. On the other hand, there’s also such a thing as too much planning: I worked at a company where the office manager took potlucks VERY SERIOUSLY. She had a system of releasing the items required for the potluck by email at 10 a.m. a week before. You would reply as fast as possible “claiming” one item. Available items would be, like, two bottles of white wine, two bottles of red wine, buns, two salads, three meat items, three desserts, etc. The idea was that we would have a “balanced” potluck with just the right amounts of each kind of food. And she was adamant that we not bring store-bought items.Well, there were a good many young people, and many busy people, who had no interest in cooking/baking and wanted to bring buns or alcohol. And often we’d be the last to reply to the email and end up with a meat dish, which is more difficult.Eventually complaints about the strictness of the system led to her having a temper tantrum and refusing to coordinate any longer. So the next potluck was a “free for all” (or true) potluck. That potluck, she pouted and would not come out of her office and we FEASTED on cheeseburgers, fries, pizza, a rotisserie chicken, SO MANY BUNS, and SO MUCH ALCOHOL. It was great. And as with any opportunity for free food at work, potlucks bring out an incredible amount of bad behavior from the shamelessly greedy: During a Christmas potluck, our CEO made a surprise appearance at our small branch to chat, exchange wishes, and so on. While everyone moved to the main floor for some games and quizzes, I had to go back to the canteen to retrieve my forgotten jacket. I caught the CEO stuffing the pockets of his very expensive, very Armani suit with our mince pies. He stuttered something about wanting to bring them to kids in need (?!), and then stuffed one more in his mouth and literally ran away. We didn’t see him for the rest of the year. One co-worker was amazing when it came to potlucks. We got paid well, and he was in the higher salary bracket, so I’m not really sure why he needed to race in every potluck and overload his plates, then grab extras. If you weren’t fast enough, food would be all squirreled away at his desk. It never made sense because he’d eat out every day at the local spots so it wasn’t a money thing.He was then moved to another office across the facility, so suddenly everything went back to normal until he had to deliver something to our office. It was a potluck day, and there was a spaghetti feed going on. Since he could no longer pile up food at his old desk, he instead grabbed three gallon-sized freezer bags, took a pair of tongs, and literally filled three gallons of spaghetti that other staff had made and brought. Nobody dared say anything due to his position, until the old admin who nobody crossed finally came in and told him to get out before he could get a fourth gallon of spaghetti. During a potluck, someone (the office never discovered who!) went to the meeting room where the potluck had to be held and took a single bite out of every bite-able thing. Scones, bread, fruits, pizza slices. Just one single bite. Then there’s food hygiene. Perhaps no office tradition reveals more about trust than deciding whether to eat something made in someone else’s kitchen. Some workplaces develop an unofficial list of people whose cooking is accepted enthusiastically and another of people whose dishes are discreetly avoided: We had a supervisor who owned horses. Lovely person, but one day she brought in a cake for her staff. When she cut it and took pieces out of the pan, they had horse hair dangling from them. “Horse hair cake” became a potluck warning for years for those in the know. When I worked the night shift at the IRS, we shared our desks with the workers on day shift. The desks were designed with two locking overhead shelves so that we could lock away our personal items and work materials. One night, my co-worker complained that there was BLOOD dripping into his desk from his day shift desk mate’s locked shelf. Our manager was as upset as he was, but since no one had a key, we had to resign ourselves to sending a sternly worded email to the daytime manager to please look into what was going on, and the co-worker was allowed to move desks for the night.It took a couple days, but gradually we found out the blood was from an uncooked brisket that the daytime worker had left locked in his desk shelf. Apparently, his team had a potluck scheduled the next day, so he decided to leave the meat (unrefrigerated!) overnight. The next morning, he showed up with a crockpot and proceeded to season and cook the brisket in the crockpot. In the meantime, the daytime manager came by to inquire about the emailed complaint that she’d received from the night manager, but the daytime worker just shrugged and offered up no details. HE ENDED UP SERVING THE BRISKET TO HIS WHOLE TEAM! At a former job, the division I worked in had an annual holiday potluck. One year a woman brought in shrimp dip for the potluck. Every single person who ate her dip wound up getting ill to some extent; one person got so sick he had to be hospitalized. We later learned she had taken the shrimp out the day before, left them in her sink all day and overnight to thaw, and mixed up the dip in the morning before she came to work. I still get nauseated even thinking about it. And weirdly, some people make it personal and become emotionally invested beyond all proportion: Our office had a chili cook-off once. The morning of the potluck, it was announced that due to inclement winter weather and some people not being able to make it into the office, the potluck was canceled. Most people took this news with a normal level of disappointment. A colleague of mine, Barb, had a crockpot of chili cooking at the office. Chaos erupted when Barb read the cancellation email. Yelling, punching things at her desk, crying, screaming, etc. She called HR (who had decided to cancel the potluck, the perpetrator in Barb’s mind) and chewed them out abusively over the phone, and then called her husband to blow off steam, and a handful of others. She yelled and cried at the office for three or four hours. (It was awful and I complained to her boss.) She ended up demanding that HR reimburse her for the chili ingredients, and they did.At future potlucks, Barb proudly announced to anyone nearby on potluck day that she didn’t bring anything to the potluck. According to her, she had special permission from HR to attend potlucks without contributing food (as was the office etiquette) as retribution for how they “screwed her over.” We never had a chili cook-off again. I make an awesome bread pudding. The reason it’s so awesome is I make it using pound cake. At a long ago job, I took it to the first holiday potluck I attended at my job. I brought along copies of the recipe because, hey, someone always asks for it. The wicked witch of the finance department raised a stink about how it was NOT bread pudding—it had no bread! And there is no such thing as cake pudding, what was I trying to pull? She accused me of trying to invent something and it just shouldn’t be done, especially at a potluck where if you sign up for a dessert, you must bring a traditional potluck dessert, not something made up!In the days ahead, she filed a complaint with HR as, after reading the recipe closely, she discovered I used a boxed pound cake mix and recommended a specific generic brand that, in my opinion, made a fantastic pound cake. The HR director danced around a strong suggestion that in the future I not bring a bread pudding made with pound cake—this was a city government and there were unions involved and my co-worker spent a great deal of time being counseled but never crossed a line to anything fireable. But to be clear, not every office potluck ends in passive aggression and HR negotiations. Some are enjoyed and remembered fondly—maybe because those offices have solved the social problems, not the culinary ones: My old job had a Thanksgiving potluck the Friday before the holiday every year. Work was very clear that they would provide all plates, cups, utensils, and napkins. They also bought the turkey and gravy. For everything else there was a signup, and it was not necessary to bring anything. (Unless you were the people who made the delicious mashed potatoes, the pork dumplings, or the homemade samosas. They got specific requests every year.) We always had far too much food, and it was recommended to bring Tupperware or something similar to bring home leftovers. You have to plan a certain amount to make a potluck successful! The lesson, then, isn’t that potlucks are inherently fraught. And frankly, nobody is really arguing about chili or pound cake; they’re arguing about recognition and fairness and wanting their effort appreciated. Food is just the medium through which some of the oddest dynamics of office life become more visible. Still, though, if you know human nature, you’ve got to recognize that “bring something” won’t always be taken as the simple request it’s envisioned as. Anyone who’s watched a union complaint emerge from a loaf of pound cake knows otherwise. Get the best of news and politics Sign up for Slate's evening newsletter. Cooking Food Workplace Direct Report