Free food was originally introduced to Google in part because there were so few food options near the Mountain View campus that people were driving a half hour

Free food was originally introduced to Google in part because there were so few food options near the Mountain View campus that people were driving a half hour each way to spend twenty minutes eating. So yes, the goal was to get people to spend more time at work, but the alternative was “time spent sitting in traffic” rather than “time spent at home”. (The other major driver behind food was supposedly the fact that the founders were PhD students and had found that some of their best ideas had arisen from informal discussions with other researchers over lunch, so they wanted to create an environment where employees had that same opportunity)