As I understand it, the phenomenon of providing young, college-educated, overworked employees with free meals started at investment banks and law firms in the 1980s and 1990s. The proposition: If you stayed at work past a certain hour, say, 7:00 p.m., you could order dinner into the offices on the company’s dime. (Stay even later, and you could take a car service home.) This was a transparent effort to encourage young people who were getting paid fixed (not hourly) salaries to stick around the office for an extra hour or two each day. Sure, a law firm may have paid out $25 for a young associate’s takeout dinner. But the firm was billing that associate’s time out at $200 per hour or more. So even if the offer of a free meal incentivized the associate to do an extra 10 minutes of billable work per day, the investment was worth it.The practice spread in the 1990s to media and technology companies. At my first job in New York in the early 1990s, at a financial information and media company, the employer was famous for its spread: free snacks and coffee, cereal and fruit baskets, ramen noodles and soup, every type of soda and packaged salty snack you could imagine. Why? The company’s founder and CEO was a benevolent, paternalistic dictator type. But this was a scrappy, understaffed crew, working in an environment in which beating the competition by seconds mattered. He couldn’t afford to have people leaving their turrets every time they were hungry and thirsty. The investment in maintaining a free in-house convenience store was designed to discourage people from leaving the building for 15-minute coffee breaks and 30-minute lunch breaks.