[yomly]

At a Facebook office I saw many people bringing their other half + kids to the office for dinner.

I know all the arguments of "it's to make you stay longer" but having the option of a free, zero-effort, healthy & balanced food option available to my family is a very useful perk in my eyes.

As a family, a healthy zero-effort meal is going to set you back £40-80 in London (£10-20 per head). Even on a FAANG salary, doing that regularly on your own earnings is a little frivolous.

[znpy]

> At a Facebook office I saw many people bringing their other half + kids to the office for dinner.

is it the norm os is that an exception? I mean: is there a rule that explicitly allows bringing in SO and kids?

Otherwise it's just a rule everybody's breaking and no one bothered to fix YET.

[JacKTrocinskI]

Learn to cook, guaranteed you will have healthier meals then any chef will make you with ingredients that you chose and with a low overall cost and to be honest it doesn't take much effort to do once you get a good routine going.

[yomly]

I fully agree and grew up in the kitchen so know a thing or two about cooking. I am time poor however and juggle many activities (including exercising 10+ hours a week)

To cook you need a well stocked pantry and you need to buy fresh ingredients. Then cooking itself takes time - prep work + cooking time. Afterwards you have washing up.

All of that takes time and effort. It's nice to have the option to get back that time and energy 1-2 days a week.

One of the best things about working from home is you can go stick something in the oven or slow cooker long before dinner to amortize that cooking time. But that doesn't solve meal planning and inventory management of your kitchen.

It's nice to be able to turn up at a canteen and know there will be 8+ varieties of fresh veg and 2 meat options and a fish option without fail. I also rate the canteen over a restaurant in some ways as the incentives are slightly different. A restaurant wants you to come back as much as possible so has incentives to make food "tasty" aka jack the food with sugar, butter, oil, msg. A canteen generally just tries to not to make too much of a loss.

[wastedhours]

> Learn to cook

I full support and advocate for this - however, eating out is often an experience vs just having a nice meal. I love cooking, but occasionally a nice meal out is preferable. In the absence of that, my bank balance has grown, but my desire to do more cooking of the sort I'd get out has diminished.

I do love cooking, but to replicate some of the experiences you'd get out, you do have to spend a lot more. Obviously you can cook a lot more home-friendly meals, but when you start doing anything especially interesting there's a large increase in cost as you pick up specific little ingredients to do a nice meal at home once in a while.