You could likely do that and end up spending less money than buying food and cooking for yourself. If you don't cook you can free up your time for other revenue generating activities, chores, etc. Total cost of 2x to 4x delivered meals in my area could be $20 to $80. That's ~$320 or 80 less then the $400 number quoted in other places in this thread.
It's pretty rational behavior from the employees side of things.
And, even before Google, when I started living alone I realized I couldn't buy milk anymore because I don't drink enough milk fast enough to not let it spoil. I've switched to soy purely because it lasts months I'm my fridge safely.
I don't think you're lying, although I don't think you're correct; I'm just amazed at how different people's baseline contexts are. In your context, that's a reasonable statement, or you wouldn't have said it.
> I can't even imagine how anyone could think this was true, even in multi-generational upper-middle class urban families.
In the context of the sweep of human history of about two million years, people exclusively cooking at home being relatively recent is true [1]. Restaurants are a relatively recent invention [2] [3]. What we conceive of as normal meals is relatively recent [4].
Communal was the predominant cooking setting for many modes of cooking like baking for most of human history. This was because fuel was brutally time and energy-intensive to gather and prepare until our species started to master tool-making to a sufficient level that individual households at the mainstream level could afford the necessary tools. It literally took organizing a community to sustainably run much of what we take for granted in an individual middle class developed world household kitchen today.
Cooking over an open fire is likely the oldest mode [5], and that fire takes a fair amount of effort to sustain solely at the household scale, and the archeological evidence for humans routinely and widely making fire instead of sustaining it continuously suggests routinely and widely making fire is relatively recent (100's thousands instead of millions of years ago) [6], and even then it was common to borrow fire from a neighbor than making it, so arduous it was to make fire or expensive it was to acquire the tools. Our species only really started to relatively routinely cook during the Paleolithic age about 200,000 years ago [7], starting with open fire roasting, then proceeding from there (boiling came after roasting, ironic since boiling water is considered by us as how we start teaching children to cook) [7].
There is a simple experiment you can conduct today to validate this on your own: with nothing but a flint suitable for knapping (which in itself is an accomplishment to de novo achieve), and plain cotton clothing (to give you a head start), work out what it takes to start a fire, sustainably gather fuel, sustainably gather calories and nutrition, and scale it up to a minimum genetic variability group. It is incredibly exhausting, and prone to all kinds of failure modes.
The sheer amount of agonizing, brutal, incremental effort over the millennia it took our ancestors to "just" get to the stage to develop agrarian systems (and there is even debate if even that was a prudent choice [8] [9] [10], though for the record I'm pro-agriculture) is mind-boggling. By comparison, our current state of civilization is just LARP'ing "grinding", and gamers talking about grinding take that to yet an entirely different level. I give our ancestors their due: they were a set of some tough hombres, and we collectively do indeed stand on the shoulders of giants.
[1] https://food52.com/blog/17568-the-centuries-old-form-of-publ...
[2] https://www.history.com/news/first-restaurants-china-france
[3] https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/03/home-cooking-food-h...
[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20243692
[5] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23230980-600-every-hu...
[6] https://www.livescience.com/when-did-humans-discover-fire.ht...
[7] https://lithub.com/why-and-how-exactly-did-early-humans-star...
[8] http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/538/was-adopting-ag...
[9] https://www.livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/agricult...
Of course they do? When I've been crunching, like just putting insane hours in, I've gone weeks without cooking and just ordering in. It costs a fortune, even at Google salary - or in my case, 'SF' salary. Not to mention the cost of living is already absurd due to rent - your salary gets eaten up faster than you might imagine.
I get what you are trying to say, but empirically false
I know many people who don't cook at all and live solely on prepared food.
(Never cooking is very, very rare here in The Netherlands so I'm curious about any anecdata here).
These are broad strokes, but my experience in rural America and in SF bears this out, rich people eat out very often and tend to be fit and the very poor also eat out more than average but tend to be obese. Everyone else is in the middle.
In The Netherlands, the cuisine tends to be really simple, and salad-kits and meal-kits are extremely popular. The fanciest food that people 'cook' is often a soup or pasta, and I'd say it's extremely rare for anyone to make pasta or sauces from scratch.
Nobody buys prepared food every day, and the costs of food are negligible for a Google employee.