For 11 years, June Jo Lee, an ethnographer, has been traveling the country, talking to Americans about how they eat. She has often been in offices, observing white-collar workers. In one interview, a 20-something administrative assistant at an architecture firm in Seattle told her, ‘‘I don’t think I ate at a table at all this week if you don’t include my desk at work.’’ In Chicago, Lee talked to an I.T. specialist who lunched in front of his computer and assiduously avoided the break room; anyone who ate in there was odd. Another guy said that each week he would bring in a crudité party platter from Costco and graze from it when he got hungry.

Schooled in anthropology, Lee works for the Hartman Group, a consulting firm. She helps clients like Kraft Foods, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Whole Foods Market and Google better understand how people think about and consume food so they can repackage products and design new ones, find novel distribution methods or keep their own employees productive and well fed. After all her conversations, note taking and analysis, Lee summarizes her findings like this: ‘‘The way people eat at work is pretty sad.’’