Of course, the ritual of talking about food can continue over Zoom, and it does. There’s still the ‘what did you have for lunch, what are you having for dinner’ dance of pre-meeting small talk. But talking about bread is not the same as breaking it together and knowing who wants cheese, who wants ham and who wants their mayonnaise on the side.

The sharing element of food is vital; it is, as anthropologist Martin Jones observes, a hallmark of human intimacy. In his seminal book Feast: Why Humans Share Food, he observed that to any other species our practice of eating together – exposing our teeth, making direct eye contact, sharing food – would seem risky; but “at some point our own ancestors turned those danger signals around and transformed them into the very essence of conviviality that defines humanity”. Once necessary fuel, to fight for and over, food became a medium of communication and social bonding, he continues. “We now use the shared meal to punctuate the day, celebrate the great occasions of life, make transactions and define who is inside and outside any particular cultural group.”

Or at least, we used to – and in many European countries they still do. The idea of eating ‘al desko’ is beyond the comprehension of anyone I’ve spoken to from Scandinavia, France or Spain, where even the concept of a sandwich was met with genuine horror. There, even the most mundane meetings demanded some pintxos, just as in most Swedish companies it is mandatory for all employees to sit down and have fika (which roughly translates as coffee, cake and chats). In Denmark, the concept of fællesskab, which is loosely the feeling of trust and togetherness, is inextricable with eating together. Then, of course, there is France, where the long business lunch is practically enshrined in their national psyche.

Why food in the office is more powerful than you might think