At the last company plus my current company where I work, all the offices have had rotating snacks in every kitchen, ranging from healthy to very unhealthy to “I want to seem like I am healthy and also trendy and charge you a lot to eat me” snacks. Because beyond middle school, I haven’t really been a huge snacker at all. I’ve mostly discovered snacks I’ve enjoyed through work, my friend who works at Trader Joe’s, or Chris through his obsession for Australian Arnott’s and other snacks down under.

Well, today was my very first time being in an office in about 2.5 years — since the first week of March 2020, when the last company saw its very first COVID cases, and we shut down every global office. And since I work remotely full time, being in an office will continue to be a novelty for me as long as I work here. So of course, I took advantage of things I normally don’t get, like socializing time with colleagues I was finally meeting for the very first time… plus SNACKS. ENDLESS SNACKS AND DRINKS.

Lemonade that is lightly sweetened with local honey in the Southern U.S., cane sugar, and “not too sweet” in Mark Wiens’s voice? An entire mango dried, or a half pineapple dried into what looks like a strip of fruit leather, with zero additives, not a single preservative and no sugar? Chicken skin “chips” that resemble pork rinds? Endless types of Kind nut bars? I was even reunited with Tea’s Tea jasmine green tea in a bottle, which I used to always have at my last company when I was in the office full time. Going to the office is not only a novelty now to see and socialize with colleagues, but also simply to explore the snack selection to see what is on offer. A comedian I follow on Instagram recently joked that one of the biggest perks of working in an office was free printing; while that is definitely true (especially since we live in Manhattan with limited space where pretty much no one owns a printer) and extremely useful, what is also true is… who is going to turn down free food?