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Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

I know Googlers who literally never buy groceries because they eat all of their big meals at the office, grab a bottled smoothie on their way out the door, and get restaurant food on the weekends. It is cheaper to get groceries than to buy prepared food, but there’s a lot of spoilage that happens when you’re only cooking 2 days/week.

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I did not own a fridge or any cooking appliances for my first year at Google. 3 meals a day at work + takeout on weekends.

In my apartment, the number one electricty cost comes from my fridge+freezer. (To be fair, I live in the sub-tropics.)

Just because you overeat and overindulge when it's free and shoved in front of you doesn't mean you need, want, or will buy the same food if it's not.

That's true! But I wouldn't equate eating expensive food on-campus as overeating/overindulging. The googler I knew best who did this was vegetarian/vegan and very fit. She had access to lots of high quality food that matched her diet, and part of the reason she was vegetarian/vegan was because google's cafeterias made it easy for her.

Being vegan because the food is easily available? I’ve never heard that before.

I should clarify that my wife is vegan, and I‘m flexitarian/vegetarian. Eating at restaurants is often a pain because most dishes contain some kind of animal product. But I don’t see how ease of finding vegan food while eating out is a motivation to go vegan.

Really? Turn it around, perhaps it's more obvious that it being difficult would act against any desire to be vegan?

Against the desire, no. I was speaking to that. Compliance - sure!

For me personally a buffet style place causes me to paradoxically eat less, as I was brought up with a lot of food anxiety so not having to ever worry about “enough” food I end up eating a lot more sparingly.

There’s a big jump that happens when you have no food in the house. No spoilage, no dishes, no pantry to stock. I didn’t even work for a company and this is how I lived immediately pre-covid in Mexico City. I kept the ingredients to make a protein shake, and had one at 11am after the gym every day. Then went out for dinner. That was the distinct downtime. If I wanted a snack, I walked to the corner store and bought one. It was a sweet setup.

I'm not at Google, but while my office was open I didn't stock much breakfast food. The breakfast food at my job was better than I usually bought, so I didn't need to buy it.

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