I have breakfast, lunch and dinner here. Frankly, cooking annoys me and going out and buying food involves making decisions more often than not I just don't care about.
My fridge at home only has Coke Zero in it and I think I've forgotten how to buy groceries.
When your kids go to bed at 7 you want to spend time with them before that so you head home at 5:30 and miss diner.
Being feed lunch is nice though:)
How about people with spouses or kids - don't they just want to eat their meals with their families? What about people who just prefer their own cooking? I can see this strategy backfiring for some, who might think "enough already, I don't want your food, I just want to go home."
The vast majority of geeks have no audience that will bask in their genius other than other geeks. If you do something absolutely brilliant who are you going to tell? Your boss? Odds are he won't appreciate your genius. Your mom? Odds are she won't appreciate it either. Your other relatives? Your friends? Some random person you run into at the bus shelter or train station?
Geeks crave appreciation, because pretty much everything we do is invisible. Even the UI is widely acknowledged as only the tip of the iceberg, and for the most part nothing really interesting happens there(1).
There is a deeply primitive aspect to geek culture, the sitting around the campfire swapping war stories element. And if you weren't there man, you just don't understand...
(1) Even good UI design and usability/accessibility is mostly mechanical. "Honey I'm home! What did you do today at work dear? I left aligned all the labels on exactly the same pixel column! That's nice dear." Shoving alt labels on your UI elements and picking a boring (but readable) font ain't glamorous.
http://www.amazon.com/Microserfs-Novel-P-S-Douglas-Coupland/...
Also, what does his/her spouse think about it?
So even if I wasn't supplied with food I'd be sorely tempted just to eat out all the time (whether that be dining or take out).
So on weekends I eat cereal for breakfast and do something for lunch and dinner depending on what I'm doing anyway. More often than not, lunch lately has been wandering down to the West Village for a slice of two of pizza.
Dinner can be something as simple as soup from Whole Foods (they make great soup), take out, going out for dinner or whatever.
As far as I'm concerned there are two things you never do for yourself in Manhattan: cooking and laundry.