It's so easy to actually forget what I've eaten during the course of a day. Chefs 'hug a wall' when it's time to eat. In other words, you wait till you don't have a ticket in front of you, grab a plate or bowl or even a paper towel...and find a space of wall to lean against in the kitchen...and then eat what you can before the next ticket is sent. If you didn't finish it, you toss it because there is no place to save anything partially eaten. 2-3 hours later, you might do it again. Work a 10 hour shift and you do that several times a day with no memory of what you ate earlier.
If you work during the day, you go home to a house with no food in the refrigerator except some things you bought for the last meal you prepared there, probably a week or so ago. You have all sorts of neat stuff in the dry pantry but no ambition to prepare it. You have cheese, good cheese, because we all have cheese because we all love cheese...and we have some pretty interesting crackers. And we have booze - could be beer, wine or something from the hard liquor family. So, if you don't do take out, you have a dinner of booze, good cheese and crackers.
If you work a dinner shift, you almost always go out after work for cocktails and anything that is being served in the after hours place.
Family meal is a great diversion from all this....The entire kitchen/wait staff eats something together before service. Sometimes it's healthy, but many times it's what available or about to be lost. When you can manage family meal, it's a great 20 minutes.
What you do eat when you grab some wall isn't the beautiful food the resasurant serves, either. It's overcooked, undercooked, incorrectly cut, over sauced, stale, dry, too salty, not spiced enough.... In other words, we eat the mistakes.
And then you do it all over again for 325 days a year.