Why I Quit Food Delivery Apps |
A few years ago, when I lived alone in New York City, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to feed myself without opening DoorDash or Seamless or UberEats.
Most days, sometimes twice a day, I ordered food delivery. Even though whatever I ordered, whether greasy, lukewarm fast food or a favorite $18 kale caesar salad, rarely felt worth it, and almost always made me feel varying degrees of shame.
I earned a good salary at the time, but my food delivery habit—alongside my online shopping addiction—wasn’t technically within my budget. I’d just throw everything on my credit card and hope for the best. Cooking (and even worse, food shopping, let alone dishes) was, for much of my 20s, one of the most dreadful chores adulthood demanded of me.
At least whenever I had a partner, we could carry the burden together, divvying up grocery trips, recipe ideation, the actual food prep bit, and washing up afterward (as much as we might bicker about it all).
But when I lived alone? All bets were off. With no one but myself to judge me, it was devastatingly easy to fall prey to the luxury offered by these apps’ thoughtless convenience. Press a few buttons, pay $20 that didn’t feel real since it existed in the cloud and not in my own two hands, and food would find its way to me, without me having to move, or work, or think.
Food delivery apps are not merely changing how we eat; they are reshaping our relationship to labor, money, and our capacity to care for ourselves.
When I was growing up in the 90s, food delivery was a straightforward relationship between restaurant and customer. We’d call up a favorite spot, then the restaurant would pay one of their employees to get in their car or hop on a bike and deliver it to us. We’d........