I used to work for R&DE as an FTE. Stanford campus is crazy expensive for mere mortals: parking permits are pricey, convenience foods (Tresidder) are movie theater prices. Treehouse and various bottom-of-med school bldgs have decent food fare that are slightly better / more reasonably-priced.
The dining halls had all-you-can-eat lunches for $6 when I attended a few years ago. The price is up to $7.40 or so now, I believe. Not a bad deal given the food's high quality and variety.
Still more expensive than cheap groceries, of course, but not too bad if you can manage eating just once a day.
When I was there way-back-when, the dining account dept hooked us up with unlimited all-you-care-to-eat (non-packaged) dining, likely because it was cheaper in terms of productivity (a-la Google) to keep staff on-campus.
Back at uni (somewhere else), on-campus we had a block-purchased meal system which was managed and outsourced to Sodexho Marriott (it was greasy, boring shit).
Stanford Dining dining halls were usually better-than-average because they had/have respectably awesome executive chefs (mostly from high-volume commercial culinary backgrounds) usually hemmed in by over-zealous cheapskates in management) but with more freedom to meal plan outside of generic/corporate standards, source ingredients from managed vendors and generally more competition (esp. when the Dining Clubs were operational but still with other on-campus options like Treehouse and other non-RDE Tresidder; ie peanut-free Ricker). IIRC there was prime rib and king crab sometimes, and there were french fries which were knock-offs of McDonald's. Btw, Subway and Peet's (Clark Center) are/were RDE-managed franchises.
Still more expensive than cheap groceries, of course, but not too bad if you can manage eating just once a day.