IN nearly 15 years of writing this column every week, the cold hammer of oppression has come down on me from New York just once, more than 10 years ago. On a trip to San Francisco, I was too tired to find a restaurant, so I stopped at a Walgreens near Union Square, bought a cheap little canned ham and some rolls and made a sandwich back in my hotel room.

Later, a big editor who has been a friend since we served together in Vietnam in 1968 became alarmed after seeing my expense account. “You can’t put a canned ham on your expense account,” he admonished. “It just looks stupid. Next time, please find a restaurant and have a proper dinner.”

I resisted the urge to remind him that we had shared a lot of less-fashionable food than a $5 ham back in our days in Saigon, or that canned meat products were quite de rigueur with survivalist stockpilers. No, I just accepted the fact that as a frugal traveler, even on the company dime, one of my expense accounts could generate some home-office derision, and that I was out of step as a business traveler.

Or was I? I have the latest quarterly report from a major expense-account software-management firm called Certify, in which restaurants are ranked by the frequency with which they turn up on expense accounts. Certify says that the rankings are based on analysis of “millions of business receipts from the past three months” from its corporate clients.