Silicon Valley has always fostered workplaces that are different from anywhere else in America, but sometimes, it is hard for people in the rest of the country to get a good feel for how different they really are.

That’s what makes this story from the Los Angeles Times, “Techie dishes on Google’s grub,” so interesting and instructive. It’s about a 27-year-old software engineer at Google by the name of Thunder Parley (I’m not making this up) who “now draws a crowd to dishes offered in Google’s 17 cafeterias by championing them in reviews he posts to an internal e-mail list. … [A]s a result, the strapping, gregarious computer programmer is becoming as influential to the company’s hundreds of chefs and culinary staffers as the Michelin and Zagat reviewers are to restaurateurs.”

Putting aside the overwriting by the L.A. Times, let’s dissect this for a moment: Google, a high-tech company that focuses on search engine technology has 17 restaurants and hundreds of chefs and culinary staffers???? This is excess that is off the board even by pre-dot-com bust Silicon Valley standards, but probably is a consequence of a stock price around $650 per share and a corporate culture that seems to revel in doing things the opposite from the way anyone else would.

This also is one of those dot-com-era benefits that persist at successful survivor companies like Google, which has “nourished employees with free food for nearly a decade,” as the Times said. I worked at a well-known Bay Area dot-com during the 1998-2000 boom, and we brought in free dinner for people who worked late every night for more than a year. The philosophy during those crazy times was that you wanted to encourage people, particularly engineers, to keep working and help drive the business ahead. Offering food helped because it encouraged them not to leave to go get something to eat. Instead, they’d get a quick plate of grub and head back to their desks to eat—and work some more.

Offering free food is not only an expensive perk, but it would seem to have long since served its purpose at Google. It’s unclear how much this costs the company each year (the Times story, which was long on colorful prose and short on actual facts, didn’t say), but this is undoubtedly a perk that costs Google many millions of dollars per year.

Employee benefit trends come and go, but I doubt your company, or any that you may know of, has ever considered underwriting a group of free restaurants for employees. Is this one of the keys to Google’s success, or just an expensive homage to the dot-com era, a pricey relic of the past? I lean to the latter, but perhaps you can make a good case for why this is a benefit worth keeping. If so, I’d love to hear about it hear or in an e-mail to jhollon@workforce.com.