Happy Donut Friday! A Culinary Case for Comradery in the Lab

Happy Donut Friday! A Culinary Case for Comradery in the Lab

By Brant Isakson, PhD, FAPS

The academic lab is a screwball cross-section of personalities. There is everyone from the omnipotent lab manager and the timorous undergraduate to the idealistic graduate student and the grizzled post-doc or any other combination thereof.

With each personality comes a different level of lab experience in terms of time spent in the lab. Because people don’t enter the lab as a unit, the time together for most people is short. And during their short time together, everyone is looking to move forward in their career stage. 

The singular constant in this cabal is the principal investigator (PI) who will be there for everyone’s time in the lab, from start to finish. The PI sets the culture for the lab—how people interact and how people become scientists. How then does a PI build comradery among this rag-tag group? How can the team work together to advance the lab but at the same time advance everyone’s perspective career goals?

In my case, the best answer usually starts and ends with food. The American Heart Association noted in 2022 that people (e.g., families) who have frequent meals together enjoy better social and emotional mental health. The lab is by no means a family and should never be treated as such, but the lab is not a sterile environment either. Because food is such a personal and cultural concoction of our psyche, simply asking lab members what they fixed for lunch allows people to relax and talk about themselves. Eating a lunch or enjoying a donut with the members of your lab creates low barriers for discussion.

Our lab practices this in a few ways. Each week a different person is chosen to bring breakfast to our lab meeting. Though not required, most of the time homemade breakfast treats are brought in. Lab members like to share culinary favorites, and it often starts a conversation about where they are from and the traditions or flavors they miss. In addition, most days our lab eats lunch together by gathering in my office. During the height of COVID-19, we wanted to maintain this time together and would wheel chairs into one end of the hallway, socially spaced, and still enjoy our lunch and time together. And we always end the week with donut Fridays (my personal favorite). 

Food is for the body, but eating together is for the soul and for the team. It brings us together if only for 15 minutes so we can talk about a commonality and connect. 

Because of this low barrier for conversation, a huge number of science discussions take place while we’re eating, educational and experiential differences fade away, and we become one group of people with similar interests and similar hunger. We leave with our stomachs full, our aspirations connected and our scientific interests peaked.

Thus, I maintain that breaking bread together among the people in your lab is one of the best cost-to-benefits that a PI can do to create team comradery and move the lab forward together scientifically and personally. Bon appétit! 

Brant Isakson, PhD, FAPS, is a professor of molecular physiology and biological physics and resident faculty of the Robert M Berne Cardiovascular Research Center at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He’s also a member of the APS Program Working Group.

This article was originally published in the January 2023 issue of The Physiologist Magazine.