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With 70 percent of workers eating lunch at their desks, the office fridge has become the recession's latest victim

By Eric Spitznagel

John Kiely, the owner of Allied Cleaning Service in Manhattan, has encountered more than his fair share of office refrigerators during 40 years in the business. "If you can wear a mask, sometimes you'll be O.K.," he says. "But sometimes the stench is just too much. It'll make you light-headed. I've actually been scared a few times. Now I know what a decomposing body smells like."

Anyone who's shared a refrigerator with co-workers knows the sensation. Take a peek inside your company's communal fridge, and you'll come across some of the most pernicious sights this side of a Roger Corman movie: Saran-wrapped tuna salad sandwiches that seem to have a pulse, leftover moo shu pork in the early stages of evolution, and cartons of half and half with the consistency of white lava.

There's always an excuse, of course. Kiely has heard them all. "My favorite is when they won't throw out a meal because it has sentimental value," he says. "Usually because it was made by their mom or a new girlfriend. I want to tell them: 'You know that new girlfriend you've got? I hope you're not thinking about marrying her for her cooking skills. Because let me tell you, her food stinks!' "

Office kitchenette horror stories have become noticeably menacing during the current recession; 70 percent of Americans, some likely looking to save money, are eating at their desks, according to an American Dietetic Assn. (ADA) survey of office workers. Longer lines for the break-room microwave increase the potential of soon-to-be-forgotten, bacteria-collecting leftovers in the fridge. This translates to increased health dangers. According to a study conducted by the ADA and ConAgra Foods (CAG), 44 percent of office refrigerators are cleaned once a month and 22 percent are cleaned only once or twice a year. Next time you're looking for a relatively bacteria-free place to store your lunch, consider that the bathrooms in your office are probably cleaner than the fridge.

According to the Agriculture Dept., the foods most likely to turn your office refrigerator into The Hurt Locker are casseroles, cold cuts, poultry, and the evil dairy twins: yogurt and sour cream. "One of the worst problems is food left in the fridge that everyone is encouraged to eat, like leftovers from an office meeting or group lunch," says Alice Henneman, a registered dietitian with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension. "Who knows how long they sat out before they were refrigerated? I am aware of one company where over 30 people became sick because leftover food in a deep container didn't cool fast enough."

In some cases, decaying food is the least of the problem. Henneman, who has devoted much of her career to studying this occupational hazard, surveyed people on the worst things they'd encountered in office refrigerators. "The two scariest examples were human stool samples stored in the same refrigerator as employee lunches," she says, "and cow manure samples refrigerated next to food items."

She concedes that the stool samples "probably came from some type of company involved with laboratory procedures; there was no mention of any workers getting sick." Still, it's a precedent for anybody who's ever taken a long whiff of their office refrigerator and muttered, "What smells like crap in here?"

Co-workers who take it upon themselves to rid fridges of suspicious foodstuffs could be asking for trouble—physical and legal. Last year at an AT&T (T) call center in San Jose, a helpful employee decided that somebody really ought to clean the company fridge. When she cracked it open, noxious fumes sent seven of her co-workers to the hospital and forced authorities to evacuate the building. "It was like a brick wall hit you," employee Robin Leetieh later recalled about the stench. Guys in hazmat suits were called in to clean up the mess. In 2007, the University of Texas ordered the "aggressive cleaning"