OK, Google, where’s the beef?
Slowly, steadily and stealthily, Google has been slipping more and more mushrooms into burgers it serves to workers, while cutting back on the meat.
That’s according to a new report on worker-feeding habits at the Mountain View tech giant, whose famously free employee cafeterias offer a multitude of cuisines in upscale food court style.
“Google has slowly increased the percentage of mushrooms in the patty from 20 percent to 50 percent,” said a Fast Company report, referring to the “blended” burger, which falls into the menu group Google calls “flipped” – vegetable-heavy takes on traditional meat dishes.
The surreptitious substitution in the burgers is part of a broader effort to fill Googlers’ bellies with more plant-based foods and less meat, according to the report.
“You can’t expect everyone to start loving lentils day one,” Scott Giambastiani, Google’s global food program chef, told Fast Company.
“It’s moving people along a continuum, whether people are eating red meat every day and you ask them to start eating a little more white meat, or they’re already on a white meat kick and it’s a little bit more seafood, or moving even further along to alternative proteins or produce.”
When Fast Company visited 14 Google cafeteria food stations, it found that each one “subtly nudges diners to make one choice in particular: eat less meat.”
Those nudges included listing a vegan burger first on a daily menu, putting the vegetable-broth choice for Vietnamese pho soup ahead of the meat broth, and offering up a prototype vegan taco that’s in the running as a possible “power dish” to sway even the most dedicated carnivore, according to the magazine.
The push toward plant foods fits with the firm’s sustainability goals, Fast Company reported. With livestock, dairy and egg farming contributing to global carbon emissions, Google “recognizes that meat consumption is also an important part of its carbon footprint.”
Last year, Google reported that its program for buying “imperfect” fruits and vegetables that would have otherwise gone to waste saved more than 300,000 pounds of produce from trash cans and compost bins (or possibly from being hurled by angry protesters at Google’s commuter buses, but that’s another story).
Google has brought in specialized “food waste tracking terminals” equipped with food scales, to cut down on waste.
“In 2015, Google cafés in the Bay Area saved 440,540 pounds of food from going to waste, through a combination of using less, re-purposing leftovers, and donating unused inventory,” the company said in its 2016 environmental report. “So far in 2016, that figure is more than 1 million pounds of food.”
Of course, the firm’s moves on food are not only good for the environment and workers’ health, but helpful to the bottom line at a company that pays to feed tens of thousands of workers — wasted food costs money, and plant-based foods tend to be substantially cheaper than meat-based dishes.
Photo: Employee cafeteria at Google in Mountain View in 2005 (Rick Martin/Bay Area News Group)
Tags: cafeterias, food, free food, Google
