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OK, Google, where’s the beef?

Slowly, steadily and stealthily, Google has been slipping more and more mushrooms into burgers it serves to workers, while cutting back on the meat.

That’s according to a new report on worker-feeding habits at the Mountain View tech giant, whose famously free employee cafeterias offer a multitude of cuisines in upscale food court style.

“Google has slowly increased the percentage of mushrooms in the patty from 20 percent to 50 percent,” said a Fast Company report.

The surreptitious substitution is part of a broader effort to fill Googlers’ bellies with more plant-based foods and less meat, according to the report.

“You can’t expect everyone to start loving lentils day one,” Scott Giambastiani, Google’s global food program chef, told Fast Company.

“It’s moving people along a continuum, whether people are eating red meat every day and you ask them to start eating a little more white meat, or they’re already on a white meat kick and it’s a little bit more seafood, or moving even further along to alternative proteins or produce.”

When Fast Company visited 14 Google cafeteria food stations, it found that each one “subtly nudges diners to make one choice in particular: eat less meat.”

Those nudges included listing a vegan burger first on a daily menu, putting the vegetable-broth choice for Vietnamese pho soup ahead of the meat broth, and offering up a prototype vegan taco that’s in the running as a possible “power dish” to sway even the

most dedicated carnivore, according to the magazine.

The push toward plant foods fits with the firm’s sustainability goals, Fast Company reported.

Of course, the firm’s moves on food are not only good for the environment and workers’ health, but helpful to the bottom line at a company that pays to feed tens of thousands of workers — wasted food costs money, and plantbased foods tend to be substantially cheaper than meat-based dishes. — Ethan Baron

Tesla Model S top-rated again

Tesla is back in the good graces of a leading automotive voice, Consumer Reports.

The consumer magazine rated the Model S its top luxury sedan after the

electric vehicle maker enhanced its software this month, adding safety features including automatic emergency braking at highway speed.

Although the Model S picked up points for the new software, its SUV sibling, the Model X, improved but still lingered at the bottom of Consumer Report’s luxury SUV ratings.

The magazine lowered scores for the two vehicles in April, because the cars did not have emergency braking enabled. Tesla has been re-engineering its Autopilot driver-assist package, seeking to make it safer after a fatal crash in Florida involving the system.

Federal regulators found no defects in Autopilot after a six-month investigation into the May 2016 crash in Florida, which killed a Model S owner.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk touts the vehicles as the safest on the road, drawing top marks from government crash testers.

But the Model S this

month failed to receive top safety grades from an insurance safety group. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found the high-end sedan, which starts at about $70,000, not as safe as comparable cars in certain, front-end crashes. — Louis Hansen

Aribnb teams up with NAACP

As part of its ongoing effort to fight criticism that its platform allows discrimination and its business model displaces low-income residents, Airbnb on Wednesday announced a new partnership with the NAACP focused on serving communities of color.

The San Franciscobased home-sharing startup will step up its outreach in those communities with the goal of getting more people to rent out their spare bedrooms, couches or homes to earn extra money. If the program succeeds, the impact will be two-fold — those

people will be earning extra cash to help make ends meet, and the effort will bring more travelers into communities that may typically be neglected by tourist dollars.

Airbnb also will share 20 percent of its earnings from this program with the NAACP, and the two partners will collaborate on a series of projects to increase workplace diversity.

“For too long, black people and other communities of color have faced barriers to access new technology and innovations,” Derrick Johnson, interim president and CEO of the NAACP, wrote in a news release. “This groundbreaking partnership with Airbnb will help bring new jobs and economic opportunities to our communities.”

The Airbnb/NAACP partnership comes as the home-sharing company has struggled with reports that its platform allowed landlords to discriminate against guests based on their race, sexual orientation or other factors.

Airbnb in September unveiled new tools to fight discrimination — including introducing more ways to report bias — but some critics said the home-sharing company didn’t go far enough because it refused to remove guests’ pictures from the booking process.

Like many Silicon Valley tech companies, Airbnb also struggles with diversity in its own workforce. Last year just 2.92 percent of the startup’s employees were black or African-American — up only slightly from 2.86 percent the year before. — Marisa Kendall

Microsoft Paint avoids brush with death

Early last week, Microsoft painted itself into a corner by saying it would not be updating one of its most famous and popular programs, Microsoft Paint, when the company puts out its next update of Windows 10.

What happened next to Microsoft is what any parent of small kids has experienced

when they have tried to get rid of some kind of “art” supply their children have, but might not have even touched for the past six months: All the Microsoft Paint fans out there opened up their own windows, raised a ruckus, and shouted how much they love Paint, and to do away with it would be akin to, say, oh, closing down the Ringling Bros. Circus.

So, what did Microsoft do? Well, the software giant said MS Paint would remain alive and well…but in the Windows Store as a free download.

“If there’s anything we learned, it’s that after 32 years, MS Paint has a lot of fans. It’s been amazing to see so much love for our trusty old app,” said Megan Saunders, general manager of Microsoft’s 3D for Everyone initiative, in a Microsoft company blog post.

So yes, you will be able to use Paint, but you’ll have to remember to go to the Windows Store to download the app. — Rex Crum