My experience (not IBM) is that there was not free food that varied a bit and different groups tended to cluster. At a company I worked at for abput 13 years, t

My experience (not IBM) is that there was not free food that varied a bit and different groups tended to cluster. At a company I worked at for abput 13 years, the engineers and product managers tend to favor the pizzeria which was run by a local pizza shop. I've never had free food routinely except customer briefing center or some other lunchtime work function. Rarely went out unless it were a short walk. (The brief time I worked in downtown Boston with no cafeteria is pretty much the only time I went out for lunch routinely.) Per another comment, my sense is that brown bag lunches used to be more common and most people stopped doing that.