At Apple Park lunch at Cafe Macs could easily run $10-15 (without a drink) depending on what station you ordered from. The food there was good but not exactly cheap.

The campus was really too big to leave for lunch unless you arrived at some stupid early hour to park underground below your office. It's a 10-15 minute walk to the south parking garage and then at least a 10 minute drive to the closest places to eat and none of those are cheaper than the cafe.

So unless you're bringing food from home you can pretty easily hit $20 for lunch per day. I doubt Cafe Macs is running a huge profit but the cost for employees is non-trivial.

And I thought spending up to eight euros for a warm meal (I'd have a sandwich in the evening) was stretching the budget.

Actually that is cheap.

I am used to pay at least 10 euros, for food + drink, unless I go to one of those special lunch time deals or street food places.

And since I am Portuguese, evenings is also a proper meal, so make it twice for the days I happen to dine outside as well.

oh man I miss those 2 o'clock lunch deals (Menu del Dias) which would fill you up for like... 12 euros haha. I remember in Barcelona or Valencia you could go to a really fancy, highly rated restaurant and "splurge" for 20 euros. Miss that place!

Where do people not have a "proper meal" in the evening?

For us a sandwich isn't a proper evening meal, just something to eat on the go when no time for anything better.

In fact to this day I never gotten into the whole Abendbrot stuff, even though I have lived half of my life in German speaking countries.

Just explaining where I am coming from, not attacking anyone.

But aren't there any lunch trucks, roach coaches, etc around for normal people to get food?

Nope. Parking requires badge access and there's no street parking near the campus. Even if some lunch truck set up shop in a nearby parking lot it would still be a 15-20 minute hike to reach it.

Heck, I remember a salad at Harvard being $12.

When I worked at Google I so rarely paid for food that I began to completely ignore the cost of food when I did pay for it. It just didn’t seem to matter much.