I'm not sure how it happens, but magazines that I have absolutely no interest in reading seem to find their way to me like lost puppies to a little boy. I vigilantly check my credit card statements every month to make sure I'm not being billed for them, but still, they visit my rural mailbox like a plague of cologne-sample-studded locusts.

One of the periodicals I receive is Bloomberg Businessweek, a relatively useless magazine for someone whose idea of a risky financial investment is buying more than three ripe bananas at a time. In the latest issue, however, I discovered an interesting article by Eric Spitznagel titled, "Welcome to Funkytown: With 70 percent of workers eating lunch at their desks, the office fridge has become the recession's latest victim" (the article can be read online at www.businessweek.com). I can vouch for the veracity of this article, especially when Spitznagel notes, "Take a peek inside your company's communal fridge, and you'll come across some of the most pernicious sights this side of a Roger Corman movie."

To be fair to my colleagues — many of whom, like me, haul their lunches in from the homestead on a regular basis — refrigerator cleanliness has improved markedly over the last year or two. However, an argument could be made that, because there are far fewer colleagues vying for prime crisper space due to the recession (especially because, let's face it, I work at a newspaper during a recession), the cleaner fridge is simply the result of less frequent usage. Excuse the word choice, but:

That's baloney.

There are times when our office fridge is crammed with more lunches and leftovers than my mailbox is with throwaway copies of Muscle and Fitness. Some of these items take up residence on shelves and in drawers for weeks at a time. It isn't that the cooler is extremely filthy or poses an immediate health hazard (although there are a few scofflaws who seem to think the office fridge is a place to admire the slow growth of mold from old Styrofoam takeout containers). It's just that, well, I often can't find my own bloody lunch, and when I do, it's been manhandled, mangled or raided for its delicious home-cooked booty.

I've tried everything to make my lunch easier to find while simultaneously rendering it less attractive to pilferers, including buying an obnoxious, lockable meal tote that can be seen from the International Space Station without magnification. I've tried attaching a rainbow flag and a half-burnt Barbie doll to the tote's handle. I have even tried keeping and eating my lunch at my desk which, I have been told by colleagues, is punishable by death if the company's food police catch wind of it. (Shh. They're everywhere.)

The cleaning of my office fridge isn't done by ritual. There is no rotating army of employees whose duty it is to sift through shopping bags, fast-food buckets and nylon totes throwing away edible weapons of mass destruction, or to wipe down shelves and sanitize every surface as if their kids had to eat off it. But there should be.

There are some staffers who clean, including our facilities manager and his associate, but beyond that, the office model is much like the home model: The clean kids do the cleaning because they can't stand looking at a festering pile of spoiled food, and the sloppy kids usually get away with murder when it comes to tidying up.

There are, of course, easy ways to weasel out of cleaning the fridge, the most obvious being: Don't use it. Drag a cooler to work filled with ice packs and leave your grub and your science experiments in your car. Do you take the bus or bicycle to work? Ask the company food police (if you have them) if you can store — not eat — your meal at your desk. Seriously. There's no harm in leaving a sealed, chilled bag at your desk. It's when you pull out of it that salmon sandwich with Brussels sprouts on burnt toast that every nose in the building starts to wrinkle. Go enjoy it in the park.

The break room/office kitchen is a luxury no matter where you work, and those who use it the most need to be more involved in its upkeep, especially when schedules and deadlines with trimmed-down staffs prohibit any one person from assuming the whole burden of cleaning without losing valuable time doing the actual work they are paid to do. On that note, I have a confession to make, one that I hope makes this all seem a bit less preachy: Yesterday, I hauled a wet bag of farmers market booty to work and shoved it into one of the refrigerators in the break room. Carrot and beet tops overtook half the bottom shelf, spilling out of the bag, leafy tentacles indisciminately molesting the lunches of my unsuspecting colleagues. You see, I forgot to bring a cooler to work. So guess who gets to eat some crow — and clean the refrigerator — today?


I told you all a few weeks ago that the Pecos Farmers Market was up and running from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Sundays in front of Beloved Pecos Gallery (67 Cowles Highway, 505-757-2518). A few weeks of little activity there spelled trouble. After a chance encounter with market organizers at Canela's Restaurant (to the left off N.M. 50 before the Pecos village's main intersection, www.canelasrestaurant.com/canelasmap.html), I discovered that Pecos Farmers Market has dissolved from the gallery site. The official Pecos Farmers Market now takes place in the parking lot of Canelas (same day and time each week), and a "Community Market" now takes place near Beloved Gallery. Why the split? Who cares, as long as the lettuce and radishes keep coming.

Send tips on the local food scene to Rob DeWalt at rdewalt@sfnewmexican.com. You can also follow Taste on Twitter at www.twitter.com/sfnmTASTE.