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Comment by Areading314 | Hacker News Reader

On a team with many colleagues from India, was repeatedly promised steak dinners if we were able to meet deadlines.

I once traveled with a college who was socially a bit hard to handle. So we go out to the valley from the Midwest and he keeps suggesting we go to burger joints with the local team that is about %70 Indian.

Everyone kept looking at me like "What the hell?".

Er... colleague.

One of the places I mentioned in another post did pizza on fridays as a teambuilding lunch thing. It would have been nice except it took us about two months to convince them to order a vegetarian pizza for our Indian coworkers. Didn't feel like teambuilding.

But as I meet more and more people with food sensitivities I think that providing food for an event is just fraught anyway, and maybe you should try something else.

That's really weird, when done right, it isn't that hard to find a vegetarian or similar alternative. Most places that cater or just about any place have good options these days.

At one place I worked we just used the same folks to bring in food. Rather than debate what they just had packages and we would check boxes (vegetarian, etc) and numbers and blamo reasonable food showed up.

I think the real issue is when you have folks who don't know what they're doing trying to manage it.

There are plenty of Indians fine with steak dinners. India is a pretty diverse country.

I know -- my colleagues were not though!

Some get around this by ordering bison - totally different species ...

Only about one-quarter of Indians eat beef, so it's not at all safe to assume that any random group of Indians you encounter will be majority beef-eaters.

Well then they can get the pork chop

That reduces it to just over half Indians, the other is vegetarian.

Then maybe they should have used the extra five brain cycles to decide to offer a pork chop dinner instead.

Person A: Do you want to get tacos for lunch?

Person B: Sure

- goes to taco stand -

Person A: 3 tacos please

Person B: I'll take the enchiladas

Person A: Oh my god, we were supposed to be getting tacos for lunch. How could you do this to me?

The metaphor doesn't work. You wouldn't dangle a steak dinner as a reward to a group of people who you could reasonably assume were mostly vegan. The intended reward _is_ the steak, because steak is expensive and delicious when prepared well. Yes, you could order a nice salad, but don't you think it sort of misses the point? It's not on the employee to enjoy the reward they're being offered, it's on the management to pick a reward that's valued by the employee. And sometimes, that means having even a tiny bit of cultural sensitivity.

'Steak dinner' is an American English idiom for 'a nice meal'. And it isn't culturally sensitive to assume that a group of Indians are vegans.

That's debatable, I'm American and would take an offer of a "steak dinner" to literally mean steak. Even presupposing you're correct that it's generally understood by Americans as an idiom, assuming that non-Americans understand American idioms is a form of ignorance, if not deliberate arrogance.

No one's saying "assume they are vegans," we're saying "don't assume they eat meat." Big difference.

I'm American and if someone offered me "a steak dinner" I would expect to be taken to a steakhouse, where steak was pretty much the only item on the menu.

I'm American, and if someone told me they're taking me out for a steak dinner, I'd immediately assume we were going to a steakhouse. It couldn't be any less of an idiom. If they took me out for pork chops, I would be completely and utterly confused.

Pork isn’t popular amongst meat eating Indians either. Just look at your local Indian restaurant menu. You will see very few, if any, pork dishes.

I don't think I've ever been in an Indian restaurant that has pork or beef on the menu, but that's in my corner of the US. Pretty much universally, they have chicken, lamb, goat, seafood, and vegetarian versions.

Pork is probably even less popular than beef among Indians. At least a lot of the Muslims eat beef, but they don't eat pork. A majority of the Hindus, Buddhists, and Sikhs eat neither.

For real, any corporation employing a significant proportion of Indian people (hell, even non-Indian people too) should be culturally sensitive enough to know that any offer of a morale dinner must feature vegetarian options. This is basic cultural sensitivity and anyone who doesn't understand this has no business managing people.

one quarter? Who told you that?

Less than 1/10th percent Indians eat beef.

Sure, but that's not the point. The point is whether you're likely to find a group where everybody is fine with beef (or pork, or any meat at all).

Also, not all Indians are fine with the Indians who are fine with steak. Significant conflict over that sort of thing sometimes makes the news outside the country.

The steak is a lie!

Oh dear! I can relate to this as I am invariably the lone vegetarian. I don't have meat or fish smells in my life and so the idea of dining out with people eating steaks is just abhorrent. I prefer not to go if I know I am going to struggle with the menu but it is never easy to refuse the kind gesture. It comes across as anti-social.

People also order from the more expensive end of the menu if the company is paying. Normally they might eat a chicken sandwich for lunch but if the company pays they are eating dead octopus or some other endangered species more intelligent than them.

The other one that I have seen is outright vegetarian baiting, so that means ordering things like crispy chicken's feet or sheep testicles just to push things to the culinary extreme.

Working with Indian co-workers on training in the UK the Friday treat was KFC. Eaten at desks. So the whole place reeked of the stuff and every surface had the finger licking slime. Bins had bones in them. If you are the lone vegetarian you have to just keep quiet. But with 6-7 people over from India in the office? The company can't just change its KFC ritual.

Few people were what you might call athletic in that office.

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