In an episode from the most recent season of “Girls,” Hannah Horvath takes a job writing copy for sponsored content at GQ. For all the corporate world’s evils, Hannah realizes, there is one major perk of working an office job—free snacks (which is, incidentally, the title of the episode). These giveaways come to stand in for the alluring luster of full-time employment, which obscures, for a time at least, what Hannah ultimately comes to see as its creativity-killing, soul-draining nature.

Free snacks in the workplace are more than just a metaphor. As start-up culture proliferates as a corporate ideal and offices strive to ensure that their employees remain happy, the kind and quality of the food they stock has become ever more visible—a selling point for prospective hires, a bragging right for current workers, and a sore spot for their less well-fed friends.

The Tumblr office in Manhattan, for instance, has five kitchenettes, each fully stocked with granola bars, chips, yogurt, fresh fruit and veggies, cold brew coffee, and a seltzer machine. “We always wanted to create a really warm, welcoming, homey atmosphere here,” explained Megan Leet, Tumblr’s office operations manager, “so having a wide variety of snacks for people was just a given for us.” Having snacks available on every floor, Leet said, is “just a comforting thing that people like … It also increases productivity: You don't have to go seek out food, it's just kind of right there.” Since Tumblr was bought by Yahoo! last year, the parent company has even started picking up the tab on lunch and some breakfasts—providing offices with five meals a week. In the summer, Leet arranges for weekly food truck visits.

We’ve come a long way from the coffee cart.

But what is all this food doing to the office environment—apart from making everyone’s keyboards a little stickier? The jury is still out on whether snacking itself has benefits to one’s health or performance—a 2011 study concluded that while frequent snacking did not seem to correlate with benefits to mental health and cognitive performance, it also did not correlate with negative outcomes. Another study found that while a mid-afternoon snack could help improve memory, it did not improve attention as reliably. This study was carried out with children, but that may or may not make it less valid than those conducted on adults—as experts at the British Nutritional Foundation noted in a review last year, “despite many years of scientific interest in snacking, the lack of consistency in study design and snacking definitions and the array of potential confounding factors (e.g., physical activity levels) makes interpretation of findings difficult.”