Early in our marriage, my husband worked as a lawyer for a New York-based company called Reliance Group Holdings, where he found it effortlessly delightful to practice healthy eating at work.
Saul Steinberg, a financier with a reputation for boldness (some would say brashness) owned and ran the firm.
To me, the absolute coolest thing about Horace's job at Reliance was that he could eat lunch in the firm's executive dining room on a high floor of the Park Avenue Plaza building on Manhattan's East Side.
Talk about a superb place for healthy eating at work! In the elegant, hushed, paneled dining room, the company's European chef offered executives three appetizer choices, three main dish choices and three choices for dessert, all listed daintily on a small printed menu.
Daily, Horace brought the menu home to show me and we started to play a game with it.
I'd read over the options and guess which ones he had chosen.
I proved remarkably good at this.
Guessing about dessert was especially easy.
During those early years of our marriage, Horace was still a relative newcomer to New York, a transplant from Boston where he and I had met.
Ever since our arrival in New York, he had been in a cheesecake eating frenzy.
He'd order it at every place he could find it.
Any time a dessert that even vaguely resembled cheesecake appeared on the Reliance menu, I knew he'd go for it.
On those daily dining room menus, one choice in each of the three categories was starred.
The starred items were light, healthy food choices.
Those menus sounded so scrumptious...
especially when I compared them to the cheese sandwiches and apples that I ate most workdays at that stage in my career.
As far as I knew, my employer, a publisher called Boardroom Reports, had no dining room for anybody.
The Boardroom offices occupied several floors in the old McGraw Hill Building on Ninth Avenue, right next to then entirely disreputable Port Authority Bus Station.
In that corner of Manhattan, the "cuisine" you could readily find revolved around greasy Chinese food, pizza or unimaginably questionable sausage sandwiches.
Rife with drug dealers, pickpockets, pimps and prostitutes, the Port Authority area back then had not yet undergone the sanitization that has transformed it into an urban outpost of Disneyworld today.
As for Reliance Group Holdings, the firm and its quiet, white-tablecloth dining room exist no more.
But all over corporate America and in the corporate world, executives are still enjoying lovely meals impeccably prepared and plated.
For these corporate leaders, healthcare costs represent a major, persistent and growing worry.
One important step they can take to ease their worries and assure the sound futures of their firms is to pay attention to the accumulating research that show the value of corporate wellness programs, including those that help employees practice healthy eating at work and at home.