Feeding the Googleplex

I visited the mother spider of the Web today. I spent the day down at Google in Mountain View for a meeting about a project I may end up being involved with. I can report that they keep the Google engineers well-fed. The following were free for the taking:

In the visitors’ area in the building we were in (one of the smaller buildings on their campus): at left a refrigerator filled with Naked Juice fruit juices. (Upstairs was the massage lounge).

The snack room had organic milk, soy milk, and rice milk in the fridge, gourmet chocolates in bins, any number of breakfast cereals, and a half-dozen sorts of fresh fruit available. A sign reminded people to wash the fruit.

Among the options at the lunchtime cafeteria were the following:

• curried vegetables with brown rice
• white bean and chorizo soup
• assorted sandwich ingredients, including sliced heirloom tomatoes
• a salad with mixed baby greens, tarragon dressing, and goat cheese
• a barley salad
• sauteed summer squash and zucchini for veggies
• main entree choices of chicken cacciatore, pasta pomodoro, and steamed mussels
• pizza with caramelized onion and talaggio cheese
• pistachio ice cream

Needless to say, we had a good pre-meeting lunch.