The Food Trade on Capitol Hill
Congressional offices used to give away cigarettes in the early 1990s when I was a starry-eyed, lowest-level Capitol Hill staffer.
The best offices for free tobacco belonged to the districts with big tobacco presence, where interns doled out smokes as legitimate free samples of their home state’s native products. Cigarette companies crated them into Congressional offices as promotional items to publicize the economy.
Staffers and interns make little or no money and need free stuff to make ends meet while trying to change the world. (Hence 1,000 pounds of free tomatoes given away last month at the Congressional United Fresh Produce Association reception.) So the front desk workers of big tobacco states became the most popular kids on the block, Hill connectors who knew everything from the direction of votes to who was dating whom.
Twenty years later, food has taken cigarettes’ place. In the best Congressional food story you’ll read all year, Politico reports on the Capitol Hill snack trading market between Congressional offices including Frito-Lay snacks from Texas, Pop-Tarts from Kentucky, Coke from Georgia, and Greek yogurt from New York. Companies still cart boxes of free stuff into Hill offices to promote the economy. But 20 years later, food has replaced cigarettes as the currency of low-level congressional connectors who—short on cash and influence—have little else to trade.
According to the article, staff assistants (generally the entry-level paid position in a congressional office) “use a massive email Listserv to arrange snack swaps.” They are training to deal in higher stakes as they move up the professional ladder, like a kids’ high school investment club—if an intern can get his boss any snack she wants from offices around the Hill, you can be sure who she’s going to hire as a permanent employee to get votes.
It’s likely this power and draw of food that will prevent us from becoming an entirely telecommuting society. Last week I visited a company which, similar to most food companies, has a large test kitchen space in their corporate offices. Around lunchtime non-food workers—people in advertising, engineering, and human resources—converged on the kitchen to cook their lunches. Simple vegetable sautés with proteins, nothing complicated, but the simple act of people transacting and talking work over food was meaningful.
I used to work at a law firm with a dining room (I almost always ended up in the kitchen talking to the cooks, but that’s a different story entirely) and it was the same theory. Food reliably pulls noses away from grindstones, no matter whom those noses belong to.
The Internal Revenue Service’s interest in taxing individuals for these “fringe benefits,” which would discourage free food in offices, is dismaying. Food keeps workers in-house and encourages productivity and longer hours, which is why meals have generally been untaxed and it’s certainly the primary reason employers provide them.
The simple fact that employees enjoy the food doesn’t transform the meals a taxable fringe benefit. The IRS is going after food benefits because they are forefront in over-the-top workplaces like Google and Facebook, but in doing so the government disincentivizes all companies—big and small—to provide these innovation-stimulating benefits. A Harvard Business Review reportA Harvard Business Review reportA Harvard Business Review report confirms what we already intuitively know, that the best (read: most profitable) ideas come from chance face-to-face enjoyable encounters, like those that happen over food.
In picking on the high-tech smart kids, the IRS provides an example of the government being unable to keep up with the rapidly advancing technology industry. (The new iPhone is search-warrant proof…hey Riley v. California, 2013 called, it wants its Supreme Court decision back.) Perhaps more than any other industry, technology workers can perform their jobs offsite. But workers onsite can be more innovative and productive.
Whether snacks as Capitol Hill currency or meals as taxable benefit, food in the workplace can be powerfully and profitably motivating. Any employer who ignores food as a tool—as enticing as nicotine to addicts back in the days of free cigarettes on the Hill—does so at its own peril.
This story is part of National Geographic’s special eight-month Future of Food series.
