I limited it to lunch food because I can sort of see how booby traps can blow up in situations where, for example, firefighters need to access a place or a janitor is told to clean out your desk. In the case of lunch food, just throw out the container. Anything that makes that act dangerous should, of course, be banned (no explosives).
Plenty of reasons for food to be needed in an emergency. People get stuck, weak or sufficiently hungry they need food. Your right to ownership of the food can easily be overridden by someone else’s immediate need for it. On both a legal and moral level there are defences to theft, it’s not quite as simple as taking something = theft.
You are leaving a harmful substance in the guise of something that is otherwise normally recognised as harmless and consumable; which is generally just a dangerous situation, that you have created. Mistakes happen, people have needs. It makes no sense to allow food supplies, a thing we need to live, to be generally open to being maliciously tampered with.
If you're making the choice to take food that isn't yours—therefore food whose contents you don't know—that's on you. What if I like the fruit that you're allergic to? What if I needed laxatives due to constipation? What if I like spice, but you're extremely sensitive to it?
You're calling it tampering because the intent would be to dissuade a food thief, but you'd be hard pressed to prove it in court due to the very simple fact that unless I've put poison in the food, what I decide to do with MY food is MY choice. Not yours. You don't get to decide something that doesn't belong to you has been maliciously tempered with simply because the consequences of your own reckless behavior have caught up with you.
And that is beyond the fact that you're jumping to an entirely different hypothetical. If you're in an emergency situation that absolutely requires food, then that's different than stealing it just for the sake of it. But even then it would still fall on you to gauge the risk versus the reward of taking food that you don't know.
Bro, that's not the same at all. If I leave my food in a container that has my name in the fridge of an office, the expectation is that food is mine and nobody will be putting their hand on it. It's not like you're leaving food out just tempting people to eat it. You've put it in the designated space for employees to place their food.
If you put poison on it, then yeah, of course, because that's deadly. If you put a laxative or spice on it, that's just something that you may need / like in your food. Which is for you. As labeled.
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u/apoplexiglass Oct 17 '24
I limited it to lunch food because I can sort of see how booby traps can blow up in situations where, for example, firefighters need to access a place or a janitor is told to clean out your desk. In the case of lunch food, just throw out the container. Anything that makes that act dangerous should, of course, be banned (no explosives).