Not all cakes are created equal

The main objection I see to office cake is the dynamic of cake rejection. Often, the baker demands a reason, and won't take no for an answer. As for the reasons, there are the weight issues, which are the most obvious. While average-sized person who says, "Oh no, I really shouldn't," get a pass, a skinny person (woman especially) who does the same comes across as vain if in need of an intervention, whereas the baker will seem ridiculous telling someone visibly overweight who says he'll pass that he "really should" have some cake at 10:30am. And yes, there are genuine eating disorders, which pose their own problems around cake-time.

Less obvious, but also problematic, are dietary restraints, religious or medical, that someone may not want to discuss openly at the office. Maybe your kosher officemate thinks you'd be offended if you were accused of having possibly baked your cake in the same tin as you'd previously baked a ham, supposing a bundt-shaped ham. Will the officemates confuse a physiological condition or religious objection with an eating disorder, an eating disorder with narcissism? It's easiest just to take the cake and throw it out later.

But there's a missing angle here. The office-cake issue is always presented as though the cake in question is something everyone would gladly eat were it not for Issues. But sometimes, bakers, your cake just doesn't look appetizing, at least not to everyone in the office. Sometimes, it's 4pm, and someone who absolutely could eat your cake gets a whiff and makes a mental note to sneak out for a Twix from the vending machine. This gets lost in all the discussion of cake and weight and neurosis, but is probably the number-one reason offers of cake are unwelcome.

As a side note, on the flip side of someone not wanting to announce religious dietary restrictions, it is also possible to lie-by-omission about a lack of religious dietary restrictions when rejecting unwanted snacks. If you're Jewish, and someone comes at you with a less-than-appealing muffin, then hesitates and says, "oh, but you keep kosher," now is not the time to correct them. Consider it the culinary equivalent to "It's not you, it's your religion."

As a side note to the side note, I think it speaks volumes that even though I'm writing my dissertation on intermarriage, the interfaith aspect of the Clinton wedding just about slipped my mind. Intermarriages between the non-famous were reported as events in 19th century French-Jewish newspapers. Today, aside from general, demographic complaints from parts of organized Judaism (ahem, Birthright Israel), I doubt if, as Joseph Berger claims, "the seemingly incandescent wedding of Ms. Clinton and Mr. Mezvinsky has churned up ambivalent reactions among the nation’s almost six million Jews." OK, perhaps "among" as in, there exist Jews who felt so-so about the royal nuptials. But this article struck me as quite dated, as though we were responding to the union of a Yiddish-speaking peddler and a Vanderbilt. The non-event-ness of intermarriage today makes it unlikely that all or even most American Jews responded to this wedding as an intermarriage. Of all the various narratives - Chelsea-as-blossoming-woman, super-high-achieving-meritocratic-NYT-Weddings-ready, sneaky-pol-dynasties, and so forth, the interreligious one just struck this Jew, at least, as a bit uninteresting.