how to handle lunch interviews when you have extreme dietary restrictions

A reader writes:

You’ve recommended that interviewers consider lunch interviews in some circumstances and advised candidates with dietary restrictions to review the menu in advance and choose a known safe item. I’m hoping you can help me navigate a more difficult version of this situation.

I don’t eat any food prepared by restaurants because I can’t reliably avoid getting sick unless I’ve tested the exact item multiple times at home. Even if I review the ingredients, I might identify something that will make me sick, but I can’t be confident that it won’t (unless the only ingredient is water).

While nothing I eat would cause serious injury, I’m not comfortable risking even mild illness unless I’m home. As a result, I typically consume only water when away. Fortunately, I’ve only needed to work outside my home a few dozen days in the past five years. On those occasions, I sometimes brought bland, relatively safe food from home if it was easy to floss and brush afterward (due to another health issue). If not, I skipped lunch, even when lunch was provided.

I’m wondering what you think my best options are for handling lunch interviews. Here’s what I’ve considered:

1 Ask to reschedule the interview outside of lunch hours, citing dietary restrictions, if it’s originally scheduled to include (or likely to include) lunch. I worry this would reveal a disability and risk discrimination (even if such discrimination is illegal).

2 Join the lunch interview but don’t eat. This may be more awkward than #1, as it could make the interviewer(s) uncomfortable. Still, it’s not always clear in advance whether lunch will be involved. For example, during a three-hour interview at a previous job, the final interviewer said, “Lunch just arrived. Let’s grab some from the kitchen and eat here together.” (This wasn’t a problem for me at that time.)

3 Accept some risk of getting sick and eat lunch. I can reduce my risk by keeping my portions small, avoiding higher-risk foods, and taking medication that can help in the short term. That would probably work out just fine, but I’d still feel uneasy about it.

Ideally, #1: ask for an interview that isn’t over lunch. Sample language: “I have some dietary restrictions that mean I can’t safely eat in restaurants. Would it be possible to schedule it not over lunch?”

That’s preferable to going to the lunch interview and not eating. There’s a good chance your interviewer will feel uncomfortable eating while you’re not, which will introduce awkwardness into a situation where you don’t want awkwardness. Plus, most interviewers will wonder why you didn’t speak up earlier — and while many will write that off as nervousness about an interview, the higher up you move in your career, the more it might stand out.

But as you pointed out, you might not always get advance warning. One way to handle that is to ask about it ahead of time if the hours they’re proposing you be there seem likely to cover lunch — so for example, if they invite you to a four-hour interview beginning at 11 am, you could say, “Can I ask about the logistics for that day? That time period sounds like it might include lunchtime, and I have some dietary restrictions that mean I’ll need to bring my own food if lunch is planned. I can easily do that, but wanted to flag it in case it affects any planning on your end.”

But there might be other times when you don’t expect food to be involved and suddenly it is. In that case, you can simply say, “Thank you so much for the hospitality. I have some diet restrictions that mean I can’t eat it, but that’s completely fine — I’m happy to just drink some ice water while you’re eating.” (Ideally, though, if there’s something non-perishable you can tuck in a bag when you’re going to interviews, you’d then be prepared to say, “I have a granola bar with me that I’ll eat” or so forth.)

You may get people who try to figure out what they can get for you that you can eat, because they want to be hospitable. In that case, just cheerfully say, “Oh, no thank you! My restrictions make it close to impossible, but I really appreciate you offering.”

Don’t accept the risk of getting sick just to seem polite! You really don’t need to. (And if an employer gets weird about any of this, that’s pretty useful info about what it might be like to work there and navigate their work functions with food.)

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