Leave it to The New York Times to flush out the re-emergence of a bad workforce trend: breakfast with the boss.

“There has been a shift in the role of these meetings-with-food over the years,” writes NYT reporter Lisa Belkin. “In the ’80s, a 7 a.m. appointment was a sign that you were so important you had to start before dawn. We called them power breakfasts back then, and Masters of the Universe wanted to be seen at their regular table at dawn. More recently, however, they’ve come to feel like yet another symptom of an overstuffed day.”

Belkin even quotes a psychotherapist, Aileen McCabe-Maucher, who says that workers trying to cope with the breakfast-as-work phenomenon should apply a “last-days-on-Earth test” to the invitation. “I encourage clients to begin guarding their time and acting as if this week were the last week of their lives,” McCabe-Maucher said. “If so, would they really spend it wasting precious hours in boring unproductive breakfast or dinner meetings that yield zero results?”

This is great advice, but unfortunately, it’s highly impractical and misses the point entirely. The problem with work meetings at breakfast or dinner is that they aren’t invitations with an RSVP attached. For the most part, they’re command performances, where choosing not to attend isn’t a career-enhancing response.

Here’s a case in point: I once worked for a guy who loved to have breakfast meetings. He was a small-minded megalomaniac, an entrepreneur who owned the company and treated people like Kleenex. Getting invited to a breakfast meeting with him always made you wonder if you would get his Dr. Jekyll, the charming guy who was marginally reasonable to deal with, or his Mr. Hyde, the wild-eyed crazy-man who would spend an hour chewing your head off as you valiantly attempted to digest an omelet. After leaving his employ, I promised myself that I would never force anyone in my workforce through an unwarranted breakfast or lunch meeting again.

That’s the one part of this story that The New York Times completely ignored. Yes, meetings-at-meals speak to the issue of work/life balance, as the Times sees it, but I believe it’s more about a push for productivity run amok. It’s a consequence of a lot fewer people in many workplaces trying to do more with less, and having to schedule meetings at mealtime in a vain attempt to multitask, squeezing more productive time out of the day and just one step up from eating lunch at your desk.

In both cases, the culprit is the push to handle the overload of work within the parameters of an inelastic workday. It’s a bad workforce trend that no one should be happy about seeing again. Even if you like omelets—or your boss.